


i have loved you so long

by estora



Series: i have loved you so long [1]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, F/M, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, M/M, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Murder, North gets the mother figure she absolutely fucking deserves, Organized Crime, Original Character(s), Post-Android Revolution (Detroit: Become Human), Rape, Sexual Slavery, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, north-centric, tragic backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-06-20 15:11:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 15
Words: 48,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15536988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/estora/pseuds/estora
Summary: “My name is North,” the androids snarls, “and I don’t need help from afucking human.”Everyone has their demons - they just deal with them in different ways. FBI agent Anne Shapiro has been hunting her daughter's killer for ten years; she certainly didn't expect to find one of New Jericho's leaders in a basement about to be sold into a sex trafficking ring. The last thing Shapiro wants is an angry android interfering with her case, especially when it brings the DPD human-android team of Lieutenant Anderson and Detective RK800 into her life.The only thing North hates more than humans isowinga human something. But if she wants to bring the ring that's now targeting humans and androids down, then she has no choice but to grudgingly cooperate with the FBI agent who rescued her. Now, if only Shapiro would stop making it sodifficultto resent her...Or; North gets the mother figure sheabsolutely fucking deserves.





	1. One | Sensitivity Session

_15 MAY 2039, 23:15_

She’s been here before.

Not in this particular underground bunker on the outskirts of Chicago; she’d been _here_ , descending a staircase with her gun drawn, her underarms damp with cold sweat, her hand shaking and her mouth dry, sick with terror, alert with rage. Then, her heart had hammered in her chest so loudly she thought she’d go deaf – now, she keeps her breathing even and her heart at a steady 73 BPM, according to the FitBit implant that flashes at the corner of her vision, invisible to the world except for her. Not her finest decision, but everyone gives in to peer pressure at some point or another, and all things considered there were worse things to get addicted to than the gym. Alcohol. Smoking. Red ice. Things that would impede her; a coward’s way of coping. She has a job to do and a promise to fulfil.

After that – maybe.

The bunker is cool, surprisingly clean and well-kept considering what it’s meant to house and who runs it, but the ring supposedly has a policy about not compromising the merchandise these days. Makes it harder for people to notice; makes it harder for the authorities to _prove_. It’s sickening the lengths they go to.

Cudmore learned a decade ago how to – _clean up_ after himself.

Not well enough.

She has to stop, breathe, steady herself. Her heartrate has picked up to 78 BPM; she breathes, and breathes, and quells the burn in her chest until it’s 71 BPM again.

Focus now. Feel later. Better yet, don’t feel at all. Wouldn’t that be nice?

She advances.

The doors are simple, a simple matter of demagnetising the locks, slipping through the cracks. Clears the room. Moves on. A narrow corridor, two doors at the end. Right – or left? Her eyes flick between the two; she decides to go left first.

The room is completely dark. It’s _not_ clean; the floor is damp, mold is growing in the corners of the prison, because that’s what this is – a cell, the only decoration a metal bar running along the edge of the wall employed for the express purpose of binding five young women to it.

79 BPM.

They’d all looked up at her in unsettling synchronisation when she entered, fortunately making no noise. Unfortunately, it’s because they’re all gagged, thick cloths shoved into their mouths and tightened. That doesn’t mean they can’t do something to draw attention – kick their feet, shake the metal bar – so before any of them can panic, or start crying and suffocate themselves, she presses a finger to her lips and gestures down to her waist where her FBI badge is clipped to her tactical belt.

Four of the girls – fuck, two of them are only _kids_ – nod frantically against their gags; the fifth one glowers at her with enough rage to set fire to the room. She’s the one that looks the worst for wear, probably protected the others by making herself the target, fighting back the hardest – hair matted, the bonds tight around her wrists so tight she can barely move, cloths torn and smattered with – _blue?_

She does a double-take at their wrists and sees what she’d let slip by her eyes at the first sweep – porcelain-white plating as a result of the strain of the bonds, damaging their skin.

Oh, _fuck_. They’re androids. All of them.

They haven’t been _touched_ yet – she knows it from just looking at them. They’re scared and angry but they’re not shying from her, they’re not ashamed and curling in on deep, intrusive injuries, and except for the one who’s been battered their clothes are ruffled but not torn and badly redressed. Androids feel more than just emotions now, they experience pain, too – part of an upgrade, she’d read the news on it just the other week, something about it ‘humanising’ them, deterring would-be assailants from attacking them, and ‘evening the playing field’, whatever that means.

Personally, she wishes it could have gone the other way – she’d pay decent money to get her nerves numbed to physical pain, the lobe of her brain that makes her feel stifled whenever she pleases. Let humans achieve an android-like existence; isn’t that why humans made them to start with? A sick fantasy come to life? Get you a robot that looks human, feels human, but doesn’t cry when you beat it, doesn’t fight back when you fuck it – the perfect plaything you can experiment with, vent your rage on, without any of the consequences you’d face for doing it to a real person.

That backfired, of course. Now the androids _are_ real people, morally and legally speaking, but good luck reasoning with the folks who were sick enough to own humanoid roombas in the first place and got angry when their toys came to life. Serves those humans fucking right, as far as she’s concerned.

 _Deviancy_ , the news called it; as if it was an abnormality, as if it was some grand fucking surprise that things programmed to emulate human emotions of care and joy and fear might actually develop _feelings_ and demand _autonomy_ and start fighting back against the people who used them and abused them then participated in a mass production recall.

All androids are deviant now. They’re equal under the law, they’re not allowed to be sold or owned, and definitely not allowed to be used as sophisticated sex toys. So of fucking course there’s something appealing about snatching a girl who can just have the _important bits_ replaced if the buyer is a bit too rough one day.

She breathes, hiding the badge away (as if _that_ had reassured them, given what happened in Detroit last year) and mouths, “How many?” knowing the androids can read her lips.

Two of them do their best to hold up their hands against the bonds – one finger each. One person. That’s good. She hadn’t wanted to call for backup – one person, she can handle easily on her own.

She acknowledges this and motions for them to stay low, quiet, still. The damaged one looks ready to eat her alive, furiously motioning to be released.

She can’t do that, obviously. Not yet. She hides a grimace as she turns, ignoring the android’s fury, and slips back through the ajar door to enter the adjacent room.

The lighting is dim, shadows dancing across the concrete basement from a swinging lamp in the middle of the room. So fucking cliché. She looks around, left, right, clears the peripheries, and advances silently towards the figure on the other side with his back turned. He’s leaning over a desk, left hand splayed to support him while he uses his right to snort red ice.

It’s not Zlatko. It’s not even Cudmore. It’s one of Cudmore’s underlings – Tony Brocovic. She recognises his trim figure, the dusky blond hair and the swastika tattoo on the back of his neck, how original. He’s been on the _known associates_ list for months now, a newbie in the outer circle at best, a decoy and lamb for the slaughter at worst.

She swallows her bitterness and rage like a pill going down dry, foul-tasting and rough in her tight throat. This is wrong, this isn’t what she’d planned on. She’s _too fucking close_ to just hit a wall with this loser at the dead end. The urge to shoot him now, while his back is turned, is unbearable – but she won’t learn anything if she does that.

She holsters her gun. She breathes,  _steady_ , silently, and steps up behind Tony Brocovic.

“Hello, Tony,” she says.

He jumps violently, a yell dying in his throat when he spins, already reaching for his gun.

That’s the problem with people who’ve done red ice and cocaine and heroin and Lord knows what other substances. It makes them slow, sluggish – weak, _stupid_. Kills more brain cells than alcoholism, makes them _sloppy_. They always think they can fight, and granted, if he was faster with his gun, then yeah, she’d be in trouble. But he’s slow and sluggish, too stupid and sloppy to get his weapon sorted or his wits together before she strikes – hard and fast, open-palmed hits into his solar plexus, his arms, his throat.

It’s not like it is in the movies; there’s no elaborate choreography about Krav Maga. It’s only about finishing a fight as quickly and as aggressively as possible – simple and easily repeatable strikes, hitting the opponent over and over until they are completely incapacitated, aiming attacks at the most vulnerable parts of the body to cause as much injury as possible. Even death.

Tony goes down easy. He drops the gun, then follows it, winded and battered before he even realises what’s going on. She kicks the gun from his reach and keeps kicking at him until he’s curled up to defend himself from her strikes, and when she’s sure he won’t get back up, she drops after him, lifts him by the collar of his shirt, and slams his head back down against the concrete floor.

Tony groans, and goes still.

She rolls him over, breathing hard. 99 BMP. “You have the right to remain silent,” she says, yanking his arms behind his back to bind his wrists tightly in a pair of cuffs. 92 BPM. Breathe. Breathe. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you.”

“ _Get the fuck off me_ –”

87 BPM. She gets off him and replaces her weight with the heel of her boot between his shoulder blades, pinning him to the ground.

“Do you understand the rights I have just read to you? With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me?”

“Godfucking _damnit_ –”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

He struggles uselessly, dazed from the blow to his head and immobilised by the cuffs around his wrists.

81 BPM. Physical aggression. Not emotional aggression. Breathe. Breathe. “I’ve been hunting your ring for months now,” she says. “Looks like you finally ran out of hiding spots.”

Tony turns his face to the side and spits, a globule of blood and saliva smearing the floor. She trades like insult for like, and drives her heel into his back again, making him spasm on the floor with a low, wretched groan.

“I found the girls, Tony.”

“Wh— girls?”

“Androids. Five tied up in the other room.”

“So? They’re jus’ fuckin’ _robots_ –”

She jams her heel into his left kidney; he howls.

“Zlatko was supposed to be here,” she says.

“Zlatko’s dead,” he wheezes. “Died six fuckin’ months ago.”

Jesus Christ. No loss of human life there if it’s true, but that makes things harder. Zlatko is – was? – higher up on the food chain than this cockroach, and if what Tony says is right then there’s been a serious fuckup with FBI intel. Six months, Tony says – right around the time of the android revolution. It’s possible; there are still a lot of folks still missing from that debacle and several years’ worth of figurative paperwork to get through. She’s not going to take his word for it, of course, but there’s no point in pressing that angle.

“Then maybe you can tell me,” she says. “Cudmore. Where is he?”

“I ain’t telling you _shit_.”

The false bravado; she’s been expecting this. Men like Tony, they don’t realise that they’re not the tough guys of their imagination, the heroes of their own little Al Capone fantasies.

This is the part she enjoys the most.

“I don’t think you understand your situation, Tony,” she says. “This isn’t a matter of if you protect your pervert boss, you’ll miraculously get your charges cleared on a technicality. You’re not in a movie, son – this is the real world.”

“You tryna bad-cop talk me, bitch?” Tony laughs, his face pressed against the floor. “Where’s the other half of your act?”

She smiles. “Perhaps you’d get the show if the Chicago PD picked you up. There’s only one routine when the goddamn FBI blows your joint. So listen closely because what’s going to happen is, you’re going to go to trial and Cudmore isn’t going to come to your rescue overflowing with gratitude for protecting him. You’re going to get locked away for a very, _very_ long time, and rapists and sex traffickers like you? They’re the ones who _beg_ for solitary confinement after a couple of communal showers. So I’ll ask you again, and you should think carefully about your answer because it will determine whether you end up in a nice single cell with a television and a gym in the courtyard, or whether you end up slammed against the shower wall with five new strains of STDs growing in your throat.”

Some men in Tony’s position listen. Sometimes they’re even smart. Sometimes they talk, make a deal, and go away for a long time in relative comfort and apply for parole after a decade or so. It’s not the ideal outcome; if she had her way, every single of these bastards would be castrated and locked in a cold, dark cell for the rest of their miserable lives. But some of them, they make the lack of justice worth it by selling out guys worse than them, guys higher up the chain. If Tony knows what’s in his interests, he’ll –

“ _Fuck you_.”

Yeah. She hadn’t picked him for a smart one.

“That’s too bad,” she says. “I was hoping to do this the easy way.”

He starts to reply but she doesn’t care enough to listen – he was probably going to swear at her some more, no last pearls of wisdom worth sharing – and slams her boot into the back of his head, smacking his face down against the concrete with a sickening _thud_.

The impact knocks Tony out. Probably has a concussion, or cranial bleeding if she treated him too roughly. The former he’ll recover from; the latter, he’ll be dead in a matter of hours. Either way, it’s a win-win situation – he’ll end up slammed against that shower wall and made to feel the terror every single girl and child he tortured over the years felt, or he’ll end up six feet under after a funeral that no one attends.

She flicks her earpiece on. “Field Office, come in.”

 _“Reading you loud and clear, Agent Shapiro. Did you get him?_ ”

“Depends on your interpretation. Zlatko wasn’t here. Just Tony Brocovic.”

“ _Fuck. Intel was a bust?_ ”

Either the intel was completely wrong, or someone deliberately gave her the wrong information. She likes Geoff, but not enough to confide that to him, least of all over a radio connection.

“Not completely,” she says instead. “Brocovic says Zlatko died six months ago, probably during the revolution. Get some people on verifying that.”

“ _Aw, geeze. Did you get anything out of him?_ ”

She knows that Cudmore is still active, and around, and one step ahead of her.

She’s fine. She’ll be fine. She’s waited this long, she can wait a little longer.

But _fuck_ , she’s going to need to hit something – someone – else tonight.

“No,” she replies. “But I found some girls.”

“ _Shit._ _I’ll send an ambulance._ ”

She spares a glance for Tony, slowly dying on the floor, and walks away. “No, that’s not necessary. Send a CyberLife repair van instead.”

“ _Jesus Christ, they’ve moved on to androids now?_ ”

“Probably just expanded their venture. Kid androids too.”

“ _Sick fucks, the lot of them. I know they’re only androids but – are you okay?_ ”

“ _Only_ androids? I see that sensitivity session has paid off. I’m fine, Geoff.”

“ _No, seriously Anne, are you –_ ”

“I’m _fine_ ,” she says, walking back through to where the androids are being held hostage. She turns on the lights. They all flinch – poor things, probably have been kept in darkness for days – and she approaches the smallest ones first slowly, her hands open and low to show she’s not a threat. “I’ve got five girls here in total.” She pulls out a scanner, flashing it quickly over them to see what the damage is, if any, and to check that against the small emergency stash she keeps in the boot of her car. “Two YK500 models, two AX400s, and a – hmm.”

“ _What is it?_ ”

“She,” she murmurs. “A WR400.”

She’s fierce, the WR400 – the one who fought back to protect the others. Her eyes are angrier, more expressive; her face tense with rage, her frame shaking. She’s absolutely stunning, too – designed that way for men, because of course she would be. _God_ , of course she’s fucking furious – spent most of her brief existence as a sex toy in one of the country’s Eden Clubs, gained sentience and rights, only to end up _here_ again. But there’s something about her eyes, that rage, that makes her _wonder_.

“Sorry about this,” she murmurs, and sets her scanner to pick up the android’s serial number and registration.

_WR400 #641 790 831._

Her eyes widen. “Oh, shit.”

“ _Who is it?_ ”

She doesn’t answer. She quietly explains to the androids that she’s going to take out their gags and unbind their hands, and that a repair van is coming, please advise if your stress levels increase higher than 80% – android sensitivity training session, she’d paid attention for the first forty-five minutes then zoned out because she didn’t think she’d ever have to deal with _this_ – and steps forward, her hands raised, unthreatening as she approaches the WR400.

The girl – woman? Female android? What’s the right terminology these days? She’s getting too old to swallow another encyclopaedia of identity labels, she did her time in 2018, goddamnit – snarls against the gag and flinches away from her touch, but she reaches forward anyway and slowly tugs the cloth out of the WR400’s mouth.

“ _Shapiro? Who is it?_ ”

“Send the van, Geoff. And get the Detroit Police Department on the phone. I found New Jericho’s missing girl.”

“My name is _North_ ,” the androids snarls, “and I don’t need help from a _fucking human_.”


	2. Two | The Road

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> North and Shapiro endure an awkward road trip.

_15 MAY 2039, 00:02_

“ _Touch me and you die_ ,” North snarls.

She means it, and Shapiro believes her. North no-last-name, sitting at the back of the CyberLife van waiting for her turn to be seen by the android emergency response team, has quite the record behind her. A WR400 “Traci” model who strangled a client of Detroit’s infamous Eden Club on October 4th, 2038, then escaped, showing up a month later as a known associate and accomplice of the deviant leader Markus Manfred.

Technically, that makes her a murderer, but as far as Shapiro knows the case stalled at the DPD and no one pushed for justice for the man she killed. That makes it exactly none of her business, and it also means she takes North seriously even though North killing or attempting to kill an FBI agent, in the middle of a sealed-off FBI crime scene swarming with FBI agents would be nothing short of an elaborate suicide attempt.

Shapiro steps back. “It’s a shock blanket,” she explains, lifting it up for North to see.

“I don’t want your foil rag,” North sneers. “Androids don’t go into shock.”

“No,” Shapiro agrees, “but you do tend to self-destruct when your stress levels rise.”

“My stress levels are fine.”

Hard to tell without the LED, of course, but there are other things that give it away – the hunch of the young woman’s shoulders, the slight shudder of rage in her voice, the way she’s clenching and unclenching her hands in her lap and rubbing at her wrists where Brocovic had bound her so tightly he’d damaged her skin.

“It can’t have been easy,” Shapiro says, “to have even spent a few hours thinking you’d lose your freedom and autonomy again.”

“Don’t act like you know a damn thing about any of it,” North snaps.

“All right,” Shapiro says, tired. “But at least take the foil rag.”

Normally she’d sit next to the victim and gently wrap it around the girl’s shoulders, holding her through the inevitable flood of tears. Even if the FBI had reached them in time, before sampling and selling, it was always a shock to the system. Androids felt the same things humans felt – and replayed memories with perfect recall. There’s no reason to believe they wouldn’t also be shaken by the experience, especially for someone who’d left a similar life behind.

North still looks like she wants to rip Shapiro’s head off though, so she doesn’t sit next to the android and definitely doesn’t tenderly wrap her up in a glorified piece of foil. Shapiro lays it next to North instead where she’s sitting at the back of the CyberLife van and steps away.

She doesn’t get far. When she turns, she comes face-to-face with FBI Special Agent Jessica Johnson.

“Ah,” she says.

Jessica Johnson – stern, cropped grey hair, a decade and a full head on Shapiro – places her hands on her hips, the movement showing off her badge. “Shapiro,” she says. “A word?”

Shapiro hides a grimace. “Of course.”

Johnson jerks her head, urging Shapiro to follow her. “Why is our suspect’s head caved in?” Johnson demands shortly once they’re out of earshot.

“He tripped and fell on his face.”

“Anne…” Johnson warns.

Shapiro crosses her arms. Easier to do now that she's not in her tactical gear. 

“Anne,” Johnson tries again, “aside from one mark, your record has been exemplary. What the hell were you _thinking?_ If Brocovic knew something –”

“He didn’t.”

“You don’t know that, Anne! I know what this case means to you but you can’t _do_ shit like this, letting your anger get the better of you! We’ve all been on thin ice since Perkins tried to wipe out a race of sentient iPhones. If someone makes a fuss about Brocovic –”

They wouldn’t.

“– I won’t cover for you.”

“I’d never ask that of you.”

Johnson pinches the bridge of her nose, as though in acute mental agony. “I know,” she sighs. “Look, have a few days off, take some down-time, pull yourself together. There’s nothing you can do until we verify what you said about Zlatko, so in the meantime… just take it easy.”

Take it easy. Shapiro loves it when people say that to her – as if they think they’ll be the one to convince her to take a day trip to the beach and sunbathe for a while, or go to the countryside and enjoy a glass of wine next a crackling fire, read a good book and settle down for a few hours. It’s almost like a cure-all phrase – one that people say when they don’t know how to _fix_ someone, how to _convince_ them to not be a hassle, and they know it’s not going to work but they say it anyway because it makes them feel like they’re doing something to help.

Sure, Shapiro thinks. She’ll take a fucking break from hunting Cudmore when she’s dead. Brocovic will give the FBI more information dead than he ever could alive, and Shapiro already knows where to start. She glances over at North no-last-name. “I’m going to Detroit.”

“That’s not taking things easy, but I hear it’s nice there this time of year,” Johnson says, trying to be helpful.

“Detroit is disgusting all times of the year. I have hunch. Intel-gathering, nothing major.”

Johnson stares at her for a long time, then sighs and throws up a hand, walking away. “If you find something serious, you call it in.”

Ha. Sure.

Shapiro checks her phone. Clears the pop-up messages – the FitBit app that’s synched with her implant flashes a warning about an irregular heartbeat – and brings up a secure case, the file on Brocovic that traces his movements over the past few months. Memorises the address of the place she needs to go, shoves the phone back in her pocket, and makes her way over to North.

North no-last-name looks better – wiped clean of Thirium, her hair combed and tidied once more, and whatever wounds she had sustained have been cauterised or replaced. She’s even, Shapiro notes, with only the slightest edge of triumph, hugging the foil rag around her body.

North glares up at Shapiro when she approaches. “What do you want,” she says.

Shapiro gestures her head in the direction of her car. “Want a lift to Detroit?”

“No. I’ll make my own way.”

“What, you planning to hitchhike there or something?”

North sneers. “My people will come for me.”

Shapiro glances at her watch. “You want to sit in the Chicago FBI field office for four hours waiting for them? I mean, it’s your choice but I’m leaving now, so…”

She turns, making good on her threat.

North hisses and shrugs off the shock blanket, and follows her.

* * *

_04:32_

The trip is silent. Shapiro has never been one for small talk, and North – tense, scowling, and curled away from Shapiro in the passenger seat – makes no attempt at small talk either, thank mercy for that. It makes for a sullen four hours, driving from Chicago to Detroit. Music seems inappropriate – there’s little more grating in a car than being forced to listen to some peppy radio announcer count down the Top 100 of 2039, which she’d had the misfortune to listen earlier. There’s a delicious irony to her distaste for modern music – she remembers being fifteen and in high school, downloading as many songs as she possibly could from iTunes’ top hits every few weeks. Her parents thought the songs were rubbish, a bunch of breathy-voiced moaners who didn’t even write their own songs, nothing like the music of the _old days_ , true classics. She’d accused them of just being old, unable to appreciate the quality of new music because they were obsessed with the past – said at one point that when she was _their_ age, she’d still be listening to new stuff.

That didn’t happen, of course. She’d turned 35 and turned into her mother. Hell, she can’t even remember half the songs she used to obsess over. Her mother was right – they weren’t memorable, they weren’t classics, they weren’t the songs that people returned to after three, four, five decades and still knew all the lyrics to.

It’s so… human. Such a unique experience to being born, growing up, getting older. North no-last-name must be about a year old, two at most, objectively speaking. Sure, she has hundreds upon thousands of files and records of human history, literature, books, culture, sex, all stored in her brain like a sentient iPhone, but does it _mean_ anything to her? She didn’t sit in a car ten years ago listening to ABBA’s _Fernando_ blaring away, groaning as her mother sang along to it off-key because _ugh mom that’s such an old song, you’re so embarrassing_ –

Shapiro jerks the steering wheel, narrowly avoiding a pothole in the road.

“Watch where you’re going!” North snaps.

Her hands tighten on the wheel. 79BPM. Breathe. Breathe. She turns on her brights so she can see further down the road; ten minutes and several potholes later, sees the exit she needs and veers off the right ramp. North doesn’t notice they’ve pulled into a service station on the outskirts of Detroit city central until Shapiro puts the car in park and kills the engine.

“Why are we stopping?” North demands, looking around. “You have enough gas to get us back to Detroit.”

Shapiro undoes her seatbelt and reaches for the handbag under her seat. “Pub.”

North’s expression turns cold. “Excuse me?”

“I’m thirsty. You coming?”

“I don’t drink.”

“They serve chilled Thirium. I checked.”

“Don’t need it.”

Shapiro shrugs. “Company?”

The look of disgust on North’s face is absolutely breathtaking. The girl, for all her artificial attractiveness, has a personality equivalent to pepper spray. “I’ll stay here,” she says coolly.

Stubborn little shit. “I have a duty of care to you.”

“Don’t treat me like I’m a child.”

Shapiro sighs. “I don’t like leaving people behind in the car,” she says quietly. “Please?”

North stares at her for a long time. “ _Fine_ ,” she hisses. She yanks off her seatbelt and shoves the door open so hard Shapiro is surprised she hadn’t ripped it off its hinges.

Shapiro gets out as well, locking the car behind them.

The pub is a slimy little dive with a dying neon light for a sign. It’s 4am and still open, the crowd of about a dozen men with stained shirts and week-old beards sluggish from endless shots. It stinks like booze and sweat and cigarette smoke and the floor is sticky from spilled drinks and other human bodily fluids she’d rather not know about. North hovers behind her, not so close to look like Shapiro is her keeper but not so far that someone will approach her for being on her own, as Shapiro makes her way to the barkeep

“Sparkling water and a glass of chilled Thirium,” she says.

“Sure I can’t get you anything a little stronger, luv?”

North utters a noise of disgust; Shapiro concurs, but doesn’t make a fuss. She just shakes her head and puts a twenty down. “Keep the change.”

Shapiro carries the drinks to a table in the back of the room. She gestures for North to take the corner and sets the glass of Thirium before North, keeping the plastic bottle of sparkling water for herself.

“So, North,” Shapiro says, twisting the cap. It pops off with a satisfying hiss. “How’d you end up in Brocovic’s basement in Chicago?”

“None of your business.”

Shapiro raises an eyebrow.

North’s lips thin; obviously the response had been on instinct, impulse, the result of months’ worth of testiness and distrust towards humans. Of course it’s the business of the FBI agent who liberated her from potential sexual slavery, despite her claim of not needing help from a fucking human.

“Girls,” North says, grudgingly, “android girls in Detroit have been going missing. I was investigating, going to their last known locations.”

“On your own? Why didn’t you go to the police?”

“If you think I’d trust a human to find missing android girls then you’re stupider than I thought.”

Shapiro hides a smile. “There are androids in the DPD now.”

North finally reaches for the chilled Thirium, her movements tense. “Connor’s busy enough with – other things. This is my mission.”

Connor – the RK800, the Deviant Hunter turned trusted member of the New Jericho council and one half of the DPD’s flagship human-android team. Shapiro takes another sip of her drink, relishing the fizz. Angry water, Cassie had called it. “Quite an albatross around your neck, North.”

North’s hand jumps up to her neckline half a second before she processes the words properly, and frowns deeply. “I don’t have a –”

Shapiro holds up a hand. “A metaphor, from an old poem. It means – you’re carrying a burden.”

“What would _you_ know about it?” North sneers.

“A thing,” Shapiro replies, “or two. Do me a favour?”

“What.”

“Look around, discreetly. Do you recognise any faces?”

North frowns. “Excuse me?”

Shapiro tilts her head expectantly. North narrows her eyes, but can’t help but give in to curiosity. Her gaze flicks around the dive, processing each person’s face, if visible, in a matter of moments. When she looks back at Shapiro, her eyes are wide, a hard edge of fury to her expression.

“Man in the far left booth,” she hisses. “He was following me in Detroit before I was – incapacitated.”

Shapiro nods, a thrill of triumph hitting her like a drug. “Can you send me a picture of his face?” she says.

“Send you a picture?” North snaps, making a move to stand. “He’s right there, just –”

“Shh,” Shapiro says, reaching over to place her hand on North’s arm. North yanks her arm away, scowling heavily. “We’re not doing anything tonight. I just need you to send me his face. Don’t make a fuss – we don’t want to alert him.”

“But –”

“There’s nothing either of us can do right now, North.”

North is not pleased with the situation. She’s obviously torn, her eyes flicking back and forth between Shapiro and the man she recognised, calculating – debating – whether to ignore Shapiro and confront the man herself, or acknowledge the logic of Shapiro’s words, as distasteful as that is to her. She withdraws, but the fight does not leave her.

“How did you know someone would be here?” North demands instead.

“I didn’t,” Shapiro says. “Brocovic was a regular at this pub and he’s not smart enough to pull off kidnapping five androids, let alone you, on his own.” She tilts the bottle of sparkling water to her mouth again, takes a few gulps, and sets it down. “Finish your Thirium then let’s get out of there. This place is disgusting.”

* * *

_06:26_

They make it to the church grounds of New Jericho forty minutes later.

It’s no surprise that there’s already literature and essays analysing the significance of the abandoned holy grounds as the heart of the android sanctuary in Detroit. It’s fitting, really – everyone knows the story of Markus Manfred, shot dead after a false accusation, only to be reborn in a graveyard of his people, a Frankenstein’s monster reconstruction of himself several days later. Films will be made and books will be written about it. They’ll probably be studied in English classes at pretentious colleges. _Symbolism._

Churches make Shapiro uncomfortable. She’s been to a few in her time – mostly dragged there by people who are no longer friends, secretly trying to convince her to _see the light_ and convert, if only she’ll let Jesus into her heart to _complete her_ or something, oblivious to their own arrogance to assume that she needs more to fulfill her than what she already has. Drag them to a synagogue and preach about how her religion is right, see how _they_ like it.

Still, she doesn’t hold any of that against Markus and the androids of New Jericho. If anything, she gets a smug thrill of satisfaction at the whole idea – androids claiming something sacred to Christians, a vocal minority of which are kicking up a fuss in the media and accusing androids of _appropriating_ their religion, how’s that for some major fucking irony. All those centuries of enduring Christians and their dogma, their constant judgement towards those who wouldn’t accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Saviour, have paid off; who’s to say that Markus Manfred isn’t the Christians’ new Messiah? And now that a literal robot messiah has come along, none of them want a thing to do with him. Not that Markus Manfred has ever proclaimed himself a messiah or the leader of a new religion, but that ultimately won’t be up to him.

“So,” Shapiro says. “Here you are.”

North’s jaw clenches. “I’ll be fine from here,” she mutters.

“I wasn’t planning to walk you to the front door, sweetheart.”

“ _Don’t_ ,” North snaps, rounding on Shapiro like a rottweiler, her long braid flicking around her shoulders, “call me that.”

Shapiro holds her furious gaze, steady. “I’m sorry,” she says slowly. “I didn’t mean to make you – uncomfortable.”

North narrows her eyes, then moves back again, undoing her seatbelt.

“Hey, listen,” Shapiro says, taking one a card from inside her jacket pocket and handing it over. “Send that picture you took to this number.”

North takes the card, looking at it with a hint of revulsion.

“And if anything else occurs to you – or you need a hand – call me. I’ll be in Detroit for the next while.”

North gets out of the car.

“Don’t go after anyone on your –”

The door slams shut.

“– own,” Shapiro finishes, watching North storm towards the church without so much as a backwards glance. “You’re welcome for the ride.”

She hadn’t planned on walking North to the front door, but she does wait in her car and watch until she’s safe within the grounds of the church and through the abandoned cathedral’s doors.

Shapiro sighs, turns on the engine again, and backs out and away from New Jericho to find cheap hotel for the night.

Halfway through the city, her phone buzzes. When she stops at the next red light, she glances down at the screen.

_Message received from **WR400#641790831NORTH**._

Shapiro smiles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> North: Connor is busy with other things  
> Markus: Hi, I'm Other Things
> 
> Hit me up on [Tumblr, I'm @hlmoorewrites](https://hlmoorewrites.tumblr.com/post/176313835538) and I'm always up for talking about DBH so come yell at me. I've also got a book for sale, so if you like my writing, check out the details on my blog!


	3. Three | OMW

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> North is 100% ready to fight the world. Markus wants her to be more careful.

_18 MAY 2039, 08:07_

Markus is hovering.

He’s being subtle about it; he’s not pacing around her or anything like that, just sort of – _there_ , at the corner of her vision no matter where she goes or who she talks to in New Jericho. Doing his own thing, working on his own tasks, talking to other people, but _there_ , as if he’s keeping an eye on here, or silently letting her know that he’s around if she wants to talk. And honestly? It just irritates her more than if he were being upfront about his helicoptering. She gets it, he was _worried_ , and it’s sweet of him and Josh and Simon to have been so fretful about her safety, and rA9 knows she held them back as fiercely as they’d hugged her when she returned, but she’s not made of _glass_. He of all people should know that and frankly, she’s insulted and more than a little pissed off he’s tiptoeing around her.

Two days of this is more than enough. She waits until he slips out of her line of vision. It’s the pattern; he’s there, then he vanishes, then he’s right around the next corner she turns. So she makes her way through the old halls of the church, turns a corner, and almost barrels into Markus.

He doesn’t even give her the satisfaction of looking surprised that she’s hounding him; just raises his eyebrows, tilting his head. “North?” he says, mildly.

“Just ask me what you want to know, Markus,” North demands.

He gazes at her with his heterochromatic eyes, steady and patient, as if he’d known she’d do precisely this. Bastard. “Do you want to talk?” Markus asks.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” North says. “I was stupid, let my guard down, almost paid for it. It won’t happen again. That’s all there is to it.”

“North...” Markus sighs.

She doesn’t want to talk about it. There _isn’t_ anything to talk about. Nothing _happened_. She wouldn’t have let it, anyway – she’d have self-destructed before she allowed another human to touch her like that. “ _I’m. Fine._ ”

“If you’re sure,” he says. “But just know that I’m always here for you, whenever you need me.”

All right. Now she feels like an asshole – jumping at shadows, thinking he was walking on thin ice around her, when all he was doing was being his usual, frustratingly courteous self, waiting for her to make the move instead of pressing like others did. Even when he first arrived in Jericho, he never pushed her – never demanded that she tell her story, or admit to anything she wanted to keep private.

Come to think of it, the FBI agent hadn’t pushed, either. North had appreciated the stoic silence, the understanding between two strangers that they didn’t owe each other a damn thing. But then, Anne Shapiro probably knew most of North’s history anyway. Everyone did, since the human journalists uncovered her oh-so-tragic past.

She sighs, hugging one arm around herself. “I know. Thank you.”

He just smiles. That infuriating smile, the one that made her weak at the knees when she was still new to her emotions, amazed and terrified that she could feel something other than rage. It doesn’t make her weak at the knees anymore – thank mercy for that – but it does warm her, the way she feels when she holds an old paper-bound book or trails her fingers across a blooming flower in the grounds of the church.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he suggests. “I have – news.”

Hmm. If it’s good news, he’d have said so; if it’s bad, he would have said that as well. _News_ makes her nervous. “Oh?” she prompts.

The sun is out today, streaming through the repaired stained-glass windows – the work of some of the androids here, whose glassmaking skills were spotted by several humans and subsequently contracted to create more patterns for private residences. Markus has always looked inhumanely beautiful, but even more so under the colours of the stained glass where they’re strolling down the corridor.

“CyberLife will be announcing its new CEO next month,” he says. “Hopefully it’ll be someone we can actually negotiate with for a long-term contract.”

Right. The current acting CEO of CyberLife is dealing with Markus’s demands on an ad-hoc basis; it’s just not sustainable for the foreseeable future. “Are you hoping for anyone in particular?” North asks.

“Truthfully? I’d be happy if Elijah Kamski stepped back into the role, but he’s terribly fond of his isolation. There have been a few other names floated. One makes me more hopeful than others, but – speculation only at this stage. When the time comes to meet with the new CEO, will you join me?”

“Sure. I’ll play bad cop.”

“That’s – not really what I meant, but thank you.”

“As long as it’s not in the next few weeks. I won’t be around as much.”

Markus stops walking, grasping her shoulder gently to urge her to stop as well. His expression is pinched, full of concern. “You’re leaving again?”

For fuck’s sake, why does he have to look so betrayed and worried? “I’m not giving up on this, Markus,” she tells him. “I ended up in Chicago with a few androids, ones I didn’t even know, which means Amelia and the others are still out there. Those are _our girls_ going missing and if I don’t look for them, no one else will. We have to look out for our own.”

“I know,” Markus says. “But will you at least take someone with you? You shouldn’t go on your own.”

_Don’t go after anyone on your –_

“You sound like Shapiro.”

“The human who – assisted you?” Markus says, no doubt recalling the way North snapped at Simon for suggesting the human had ‘saved’ her. North grits her teeth and her shoulders burn, still feeling the weight of FBI Special Agent Shapiro’s eyes on her shoulders two days later.

“She told me not to go after anyone on my own.”

“She’s right.”

“I had things under control,” North snaps.

“Of course you did.”

North shoves him. Markus pretends to stagger, chuckling and rubbing his arm. She smiles back, but they turn serious again quickly.

“Please, North,” he says quietly. “If something happened to you… I don’t know that this place could go on without you.”

“Don’t give me that. You’ll be fine. You have Josh and Simon and Connor –”

“And we all need _you_ , we always have. I might have led you in the revolution but there wouldn’t even have been a Jericho or android sanctuary without you. So just…”

She grasps his hand, twines her fingers through his, their skin peeling back and white threaded fingers opening a stream of reassurance and gratitude and affection between them. It’s not the same heated or desperate union of their moment on the rooftop, so many months ago – it never will be again – but gods, they’d been so _young_ , so new and fresh, him full of shock that the world was not the kind, gentle place his painter father had made it seem, and she so full of rage and fury and bile for knowing nothing but hatred and pain and suffering. Instead this is gentle, calm – safety. Family. _Home_.

She won’t be so stupid again. New Jericho does need her, Markus especially. If she vanishes, who else will be there to yell at them when things need doing? “I’ll be careful,” she promises, ending the connection.

“That’s all I ask for.”

“Speaking of Connor,” North says, glancing up and down the corridor, no Connor in sight. “I’d’ve thought you’d be with him.”

“Wh- no, I – why would I be with Connor?” Markus asks.

 _Good grief_ , did he just stammer? “Just that you’ve been spending an awful lot of time with each other lately,” North says casually, hiding a smirk.

Markus frowns. “He’s been teaching me self-defence techniques.”

That’s an interesting euphemism.

“Perhaps you’d consider joining us? He’ll be coming by New Jericho tonight, so you can ask him then. I know you can fight already but it can’t hurt to have a few extra tricks up your sleeve, all things considered.”

And deal with them eye-fucking each other for several hours while they roll around on the floor shirtless because they’re too cowardly to act on their disgustingly obvious sexual tension? They’d basically been dry-humping the other day and still had the nerve to call it “training”.

“No,” North says. “The way you two carry on is borderline pornographic. I saw more than enough of that at the Eden Club.”

If androids could blush, Markus’s face would be bright red. Or blue. “Excuse me?” he says.

“Thanks for the offer, though,” North says flippantly. “Thought I'd ask him to look into something for me, if he’s got time.”

“He’s on a case at the moment,” Markus says, already composed again. _Asshole_.

Connor has been busy since gaining citizenship and taking a proper badge and rank in the DPD. She knows he’d make the missing girls his priority if she asked, which is exactly why she doesn’t. She likes Connor – she does, he risked everything for them – but she’s not sure she… _trusts_ him, entirely.

“Too bad,” she says with a shrug. “See you later, Markus.”

“North.”

“Don’t burn the place down while I’m gone.”

“North!”

“What?”

“Check back in every few hours.”

“All right.”

“I mean it!

“ _All right!_ ”

“Don’t go on your own, North!”

North flips him off as she stalks away.

She hears him laugh behind her. He pings her a few minutes later, his message appearing in her vision and coding.

_(10:03 AM) **RK200#684842971MARKUSMANFRED** : Be safe._

North snorts, holstering her gun. Sure. She’ll keep _safe_. Like hell she’ll let another human lay a hand on her, ever again.

* * *

_11:25_

_Detroit is disgusting all times of the year_ , Anne Shapiro had said that night.

She’d thought North couldn’t hear her, but humans always forget that androids have better hearing, better sight, better reaction times than they _ever_ could. Of course North heard her conversation with the other FBI agent.

The most annoying thing about the comment is that it wasn’t _wrong_ , not completely. There are beautiful parts of Detroit – the church grounds of New Jericho for one, Carl Manfred’s neighbourhood a close second.

The neighbourhood where Amelia went missing two weeks ago is one of those disgusting areas – abandoned buildings, graffiti, bags of rubbish piling up along the streets, rats dead and alive all over the street. It smells faintly of rotting food and red ice; there are more than a few syringes crushed all over the sidewalks. The sun had been out earlier; it still is, technically, but being in this suburb is like standing in the middle of a black hole – the white-hot glare of the sun and the soft blue of the sky is being leeched from above, leaving everything around her feel grey and cold like the ugly abandoned blocks of units with smashed windows and boarded doors.

North has seen humans live in appalling conditions, but even this seems to be too much for them. The streets are bare but for the fraying plastic bags and empty bottles being swept down the street by gusts of cold wind that smells like sweat and garbage and despair.

What had Amelia been _doing_ here? North hugs her jacket around her body tighter, even though she isn’t affected by the cold. It strikes her as a very human thing to do – seeking comfort from a thin piece of fabric sewed to fit the contours of her figure. She slides her hand into her jacket pocket and starts when her fingers meet the edge of a card.

She frowns, and pulls out the now-worn cardboard rectangle between her fingers, turning it over. There’s no reason for her to keep it, really – she’s used the number once already, to send Shapiro the picture she took of the man in the bar, so she has it stored in her coding. But she looks at it anyway, the printed ink and flimsy paper that will disintegrate in mild rain. She could tear it in half and watch the pieces flutter to the ground where it will drown in a puddle of mud. She clenches her fist, enjoying the way the paper crushes without resistance.

 _I know what this case means to you_ , the other FBI agent had said to Shapiro that night. What did she mean, exactly? This _case_ – that means it’s active. That means Shapiro has more information than North could ever find without help.

_You shouldn’t go on your own._

“Shit,” North swears, and smooths out the card.

_(11:36 AM) **WR400#641790831NORTH** : 153 Crescent Street. 15 minutes._

She regrets it the moment she sends it, but it’s too late now – the message is gone, no doubt pinging on Shapiro’s phone. An agonising minute and a half creeps by before the reply flashes in front of her eyes.

_(11:38 AM) **Shapiro, Anne** : omw_

OMW? What is that, a typo? She probably dropped her phone. Trust an old person to not know how to text properly. The woman could barely drive, swerving like a maniac on the roads.

_(11:38 AM) **WR400#641790831NORTH** : OMW?_

_(11:39 AM) **Shapiro, Anne** : on my way_

North rolls her eyes.

Fourteen minutes and twenty-six seconds later, the black sedan that North spent the better part of four processor-numbing hours in parks halfway down the street from where she’s waiting.

Anne Shapiro is tall for a human woman, almost 5’8’’ without footwear support. Her hair is curled, cropped short, her features sharp and angular, high cheekbones and her nose reminding North of old Roman statues – classical. Olive-toned skin, untamed eyebrows, no makeup, not even the faintest hint of blush on those dull cheeks. The corners of her eyes are wrinkled from age or stress, her forehead creased from prolonged frowning, grey hair peeking through at roots her dark hair. She’d never have made it as an Eden Club android; she’s too old, too strong, too hard and too intense, not sultry or full-lipped, not beautiful and certainly not attractive.

North is sick with jealousy. If she’d looked like that – if the hands of the men who’d sculpted her body and modelled her breasts and stuck their fingers in her cunt when she was on the assembly belt had made her look like Anne Shapiro – she definitely wouldn’t have ended up in the Eden Club.

Shapiro makes her way over to North, her hands in the pockets of her long coat. “North,” she greets, in that low drawl of hers, simultaneously sounding amused and exhausted with everything. “Interesting place for a meeting.”

North isn’t used to people maintaining such intense eye contact with her. Usually humans’ eyes dip down, their expressions turning either leery or judgemental, as if she had a fucking say in the way she was designed. But Shapiro maintains that cool, steady gaze, her head tilted to the side, waiting for North to speak.

North won’t deny that she’s – curious. Intrigued, even, by the human. She’s FBI, like the man who would have seen every single android in the United States deactivated and disassembled like defective toys, but she didn’t –

She didn’t _look_ at North the way everyone else did.

Doesn’t mean she’ll let her guard down. She brushes her hand at her side, comforted by the presence of the firearm. “Shapiro,” North replies stiffly.

Shapiro nods towards the abandoned building. “Tell me what we’re doing here.”

Short, straight to the point – doesn’t want to ask why North brought her out here, or ask her how she _feels_ , or tell her she shouldn’t be here. North appreciates that. She curbs her instinct to snap _none of your business_ because how stupid would that make her look, after asking the woman to come out here? She swallows her pride and talks. “About two weeks ago, Amelia – a Traci model – went missing. Her partner is devastated, says that it’s not like her to just go silent or run off. I was – retracing her steps when I was… inconvenienced.”

The corner of Shapiro’s mouth turns upwards, but she doesn’t comment at that – doesn’t make a jab about North having her to thank, or that she was a little more than just _inconvenienced_. She stays silent and waits for North to continue.

“This is where Amelia was last seen,” North explains. “I pulled some footage from an android who’d just arrived at New Jericho. He saw her go into the building. So – that’s why I’m here. To see if she’s – still here, or if there are… clues.”

Shapiro nods. “Good detective work.”

North doesn’t need to be condescended to. She knows it’s good work. “I didn’t ask for your approval,” she snaps.

There it goes – that eyebrow, arching in dismay. “Pick your battles, North,” Shapiro says, stepping past her swiftly. “You didn’t have to tell me you were coming here. Why go to the trouble?”

“Because –” North says, then grimaces. “I can’t do it on my own. I need your help.”

“You need _my_ help?” Shapiro repeats, eyebrow arched again, this time in amusement. “Last I checked, it’s my case. Seems like I need yours.”

_I know what this case means to you._

“It’s not just Amelia, is it?” North says. “There are others, aren’t there?”

“Yes,” Shapiro says. “Not just androids. Human girls, too. This is part of something much bigger.”

North doesn’t have much of an opinion on human girls, adult or otherwise; she’s had little to do with children. Even the android children unnerve her. But as far as she’s concerned, until now it’s always been humans and androids, a clear divide of identities. This is – jarring. To think that to some humans, the divide isn’t human or android, but a divide of man and woman. Such a human way of thinking, so binary, the way they treat everything else, always searching for ways to _separate_ and _other_.

As she didn’t have enough reason to hate humans already.

“What _does_ this case mean to you?” North asks suddenly, without meaning to.

Shapiro frowns. “What?”

“The other FBI agent that night – she said she knows what this case means to you. Sounded personal.”

“Were you eavesdropping?”

“It’s not my fault you humans forget how good our hearing is.”

Shapiro closes her eyes for a few seconds, looking tired.

“So?”

“It’s none,” Shapiro says, opening her eyes, “of your business.”

Oh, that’s fucking rich. Fine, North thinks, be that way. North doesn’t particularly care anyway; she’s not here to make friends with the woman. She snorts derisively and moves to push past Shapiro, but Shapiro’s hand closes around her elbow, holding her back.

“Don’t touch me,” North snarls, yanking her arm out of the grasp.

Shapiro holds up her hands. “If you’re coming in with me, I have one rule.”

“Rule?” North says. “You said so yourself, I didn’t _have_ to tell you I was coming here.”

“And yet you did, because some part of you knows it’s dangerous and you shouldn’t have come here on your own anyway. Whatever happens, follow my lead.”

“Why?”

“This is my case. I’ve been on it for ten years now –”

“Ten years?” North repeats, unimpressed. “Sounds like you’re not very good at your job if this has been going on for ten years.”

Shapiro stares at her for a long few moments, her eyes hard and her lips pressed into a thin line.

“You’re lucky I find your attitude amusing,” she finally says. “Listen closely, North, because there is far more at stake here than your pride. Follow. My. Lead. If I tell you to do something, you do it. If I tell you to stop, to get behind me, or to run, you do it.”

“I don’t take orders from anyone except myself, least of all from a human.”

“I’m not asking you to obey me because you’re an android and I’m human, I’m asking you to obey me because you’re a civilian and I’m law enforcement, and if anything happens to you then that’s on _me_. Got it?”

Law enforcement and civilian – that’s another division of identity she’s not accustomed to, unless it’s law enforcement and criminal, hunter and hunted. _Civilian_. Like she’s Shapiro’s responsibility, like Shapiro is going to protect her. Shapiro has _already_ protected, but only due to circumstance, not choice. This sounds like a choice and it sounds strange to hear a human say it, let alone a human whose job not six months ago probably involved hunting down deviants.

“Fine,” North bites out, lying through her teeth.

It’s enough to convince Shapiro. She nods and starts striding towards the dilapidated building which was Amelia’s last known location.

North swears, regretting everything, and follows her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The reason Markus/North didn't work out:
> 
> North: I was raped and abused repeatedly my entire life by humans, they're monsters, I hate them  
> Markus: Maybe you just had a bad experience? My father-owner, Carl, the millionaire painter -
> 
> You guys I am THRILLED with the response this fic is getting. I know OCs can be off-putting to read so thank you so much for sticking with me, I'm so glad you've been enjoying Anne!


	4. Four | Bad Taste

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lieutenant Hank Anderson and FBI Special Agent Anne Shapiro have a meet-cute. Kind of.

_18 MAY 2039, 12:13_

“You mentioned you found Amelia’s last known location from pulling a video feed from an android.”

Shapiro is steady, methodical; taking her time with each level of the building. It used to be an office block, abandoned years before the revolution. Their boots leave prints in the dust and dirty and the walls are slick with rot and moisture, the walls cracked with concrete cancer exposing the rusted steel bars inside it like a decaying body. She has a flashlight, trailing it around the edges of the corridors and rooms, those dark eyes of hers analysing everything.

“Yes,” North replies. “I was asking around New Jericho, and he said he thought he saw her. We interfaced, and he showed me the footage.”

It wasn’t much – just a glimpse of Amelia arriving by bus and heading towards the building, but it was enough for North to decide to make her own way there, just in case.

She’d been stunned and put into forced stasis and cut off from communication on the way.

“Useful skill,” Shapiro says.

Of course. Humans can’t interface with other humans – they have to rely on them to tell the truth, or work out what is a lie and what is not by comparing other stories. It seems so cumbersome. No wonder they fight all the time, and make up stupid binaries to separate themselves – if they can barely communicate, of course they can barely function as a species unless they’ve banded together to wipe out another ‘other’.

“Yes,” North agrees.

“Tell me about him.”

“Tell you what?”

“Your android friend, the one who saw Amelia. Does he have a name? Model? What did he used to do?”

He has a name and a model, but North isn’t just going to hand that information over without due cause. She, and the android, have rights now. She knows how this shit works. “He was a receptionist – actually, he was one at the FBI office here in Detroit. He fled about a week before the uprising, spent a lot of time in hiding.”

Shapiro peers around another corner. “Interesting.”

“Why?” North asks, an unpleasant sensation crawling up her back. “What are you suggesting?”

“Not suggesting anything,” Shapiro replies. “I just said it was interesting. I'd like to meet this android, if I could.”

She can like all she wants; it’s not going to happen, not unless she has a damn good reason beyond _interest_ to meet him. He and other androids spent too long as slaves to law enforcement groups, only to be the first to be rounded up and destroyed. He would have been shot by Perkins himself, if he hadn’t gone into hiding after Markus’s broadcast. Shapiro might behave as though she’s perfectly accepting of androids, but she’s still FBI. North won't forget that any time soon and Shapiro is a fool if she thinks North will.

North opens her mouth to respond, but the distant sound of breaking glass interrupts.

Shapiro goes to high alert. Her torch vanishes, and her gun appears in her hand and she gestures for North to get behind her.

Without even thinking, North obeys.

Shame that she fell into line so easily, like a machine taking orders from a human, kicks up the pace of her regulator. It floods her blue blood warm, heating her face. If Markus – if Simon and Josh and every single other free android in New Jericho – had seen that, what would they think of her? With a silent growl she pulls out her own gun, keeping it level.

Shapiro notices the movement, her eyes flicking across the weapon. “Where did you get that?” she asks, her voice low and wary.

“It's mine.”

“I hope you have a license for it.”

A license? She only became a person under the law three months ago. Of course she doesn't have a fucking license for it. More like a license to kill. “Sure,” North lies.

Shapiro just gives North this _look_ , as if to say, _I know you’re lying and I don’t even know why I bothered asking_ , then presses her finger to her lips, just like the first time North saw her – a monstrous figure clad in black armour, the very same waking nightmare that haunts her when she goes into stasis, a demon from that cold November night when she and the survivors of Jericho sang in the falling snow for their lives.

But Shapiro had no helmet on; her eyes had met North’s in that basement and she’d pressed her finger to her lips, and in that moment North _knew_. She’d allowed herself to believe that this human who could have been her enemy was going to save her life.

North falls silent and follows.

Shapiro moves like a predator. Despite the weight of her boots, her steps are light and silent, every movement of hers controlled. Even her breathing is steady, though North’s receptors pick up the increase in her rib movement, a slight decrease in her oxygen levels. Shapiro flattens herself against the wall, silently creeping to the corner where it angles sharply left, gesturing for North to do the same.

North can hear – _something_. Faint shuffling that aren’t her own or Shapiro’s. There’s someone else here, just around the corner. North flattens herself against the wall as well, mind racing, pump hammering silently in her chassis. Shapiro readies her weapon, and North sees her lips move – _one, two, three_ – and Shapiro spins out of cover, her arms outstretched and her gun aimed at their assailant.

“ _FBI, PUT YOUR WEAPON ON THE GROUND AND YOUR HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEAD_ –”

“ _DETROIT POLICE, PUT THE GUN DOWN AND GET ON YOUR KNEES_ –”

Time slows. Not the way it can for Markus – he’s described it before, a suspension of reality that is actually his unique mind speeding up, giving him the perception that time has frozen to a slow crawl – but long enough for her own mind, gifted with the ability to read humans and their states of mind to best perform for them, to draw in the scene. Shapiro, her face fierce and her finger around the trigger, pointing at a man in his early 50s with shaggy grey hair and an untrimmed beard, wrinkled shirt and unironed pants and his own weapon trained on Shapiro. Behind him –

_“Connor?!”_

“North!”

The thing about Connor is – he's deviant, he's alive, a recognised person under the law just like her and every other android, but he's still such a –

 _Machine_. Sometimes.

He never did remove his LED. Almost every single other android has, the only others who haven't simply worried about damaging themselves. Connor doesn't have to worry about damage – his LED is about as decorative as they come, which means he makes a conscious decision, every day, to bear the symbol of their slavery. It's his choice – that's what they all fought for, after all, choice – but it's not one she has to like.

She's interfaced with him, just once, a couple of months ago. He still processes thing in visual code. They all do, on some level - receive warnings when their biocomponents are compromised, temperature readings - but those are background to her now. She doesn't look at a human and automatically receive her old _run_eden_protocol_15.exe_ prompt, flashing before her eyes. She's knows it's there, buried in her processors, one of the lines of code that make her who she is whether she likes it or not, but it's like a distant, unpleasant memory, not a suggestion for how she interacts with the world.

But Connor – he still gets dialogue prompts. She saw it during the interface – so many lines of code, a drive to analyse everything, a guide to every interaction he has as if he’s never truly been able to think for himself beyond the processing, and a glimpse of a frozen rose garden before they released each other, the exchange of information over.

She likes Connor. It's not his fault he's a deviant prototype, mercy knows what CyberLife did to him when he was on the assembly belt. But she doesn't trust him.

She watches him process the situation, his LED spinning yellow, probably cycling through his dialogue options – _[Suggestion: DE-ESCALATE], [Suggestion: INTERVENE], [Suggestion: SHOOT], [Suggestion: DO NOTHING]_.

“ _– WON’T SAY IT AGAIN, PUT YOUR –”_

"It's all right, Lieutenant!"

1.05 seconds have passed.

North blinks away a flashing warning about her regulator pounding overtime, and lowers her gun. “Shapiro, don’t –!”

Silence. Then Lieutenant Hank Anderson of the Detroit Police Department, and FBI Special Agent Anne Shapiro, step back at the same time, swearing and lowering their weapons.

“Oh, fuck,” Anderson wheezes. “Jesus Christ.”

Shapiro presses a hand to her chest, closing her eyes for a swift second. “You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you,” she mutters waspishly, holstering her gun.

“Yeah, back at you,” Anderson scowls. “The hell is the FBI doing here?”

“Why are _you_ here?” North shoots back before Shapiro can answer.

“We’re investigating Amelia’s disappearance,” Connor replies.

That – takes her by surprise. “You are?”

“Of course I am.” He sounds offended, like North has slighted him in some way. “North, when you went missing, I – of course we went looking for you. I thought you’d be recovering, so Lieutenant Anderson and I picked up your trail.”

“The path led us here,” Anderson says, leaning against the wall now as if he’s about to have a conniption. So fragile, easily shaken, these humans are – if Markus had been just a little more violent, a little more like _North_ , their bodies would have rivalled the bodies of broken and deactivated androids in the mass graveyards.

Shapiro issues a grunt. “All right, well, touching as this is,” she says, “this is out of DPD jurisdiction. It’s part of a larger case of mine.”

“Great,” Anderson says. “I suppose you’re going to tell us to fuck off your crime scene?”

“I was going to suggest comparing notes,” Shapiro says tightly, and that almost makes North grin against her own accord, “but if _that’s_ the way you’re going to be –”

“We’ll cooperate,” Connor says quickly. “ _Won’t we_ , Lieutenant?”

Anderson scowls. “Sure. Whatever, kid. Your call.”

Connor processes this and computes a response. “We found signs of a struggle around the corner,” he tells Shapiro and North.

“The glass?” Shapiro asks.

“Nothin’,” Anderson says. “Pigeon landed on an old window frame, whole thing collapsed.”

“Show us the area,” North demands.

Connor glances at Anderson, who lifts a lazy shoulder, and they both turn and meander over to the area they’d identified.

“As you know, blue blood dries clear, but I’m able to see the traces of it,” Connor advises them, for Shapiro’s sake. “There’s a fair amount of old Thirium in this area, indicating an android was held down by a much stronger assailant.”

Amelia. North’s fists clench and she chews her lower lip, her distant hope of finding Amelia alive in here and squatting for whatever godforsaken reason vanishing. When she glances sideways, she sees Shapiro looking at her, with an odd expression she can’t quite place.

“Connor, for fuck’s sake!”

They both look towards Connor, who is kneeling down and has swiped his finger across the floor.

“I’m about to analyse the sample,” Connor advises Shapiro, ignoring Anderson. “Don’t be alarmed.”

“Analyse ho—”

Connor sticks his finger in his mouth.

“Oh,” Shapiro says, eyebrow arched. “Sure. Why not.”

Anderson utters a noise of disgust. “I hate it when you do that.”

Connor’s LED blinks yellow and he pulls his finger out. “The blue blood belongs to Amelia,” he says.

North closes her eyes.

“There’s not enough here to suggest she bled out, but there are also traces of semen in the sample.”

Horrified silence stretches out between the four of them.

Then Anderson heaves a sigh, long and weary. “I’m washing your mouth out with soap again the moment we get home, Connor,” he says.

Connor’s LED flares red. “I will _not_ cooperate with you this time, Lieutenant!”

North doesn’t care much for their banter. “Is there a record for the man?” she asks, sick to the core. She’ll be glad to go the rest of her life never thinking about _semen_ again – how it used to fill her and would run out when the Eden Club customers were done with her, how she would have to engage her _clean_self.exe_ program to wash it out. When she was still a machine, it was ritual, meaningless.

Then she started to – _understand_.

Connor connects to the DPD system, closing his eyes briefly. “Yes,” he says, and tells them the name of the man who’d held Amelia down.

Shapiro swears quietly beside North.

“Show me his face,” North demands.

_(1:54 PM) **RK800#313248317-52CONNORANDERSON:** [img. received].jpg_

The man’s face flashes before her eyes, and her core temperature regulator glitches, running her Thirium cold with the next pump.

"It's him," North says, numbly. She turns on Shapiro, whose lips are thin. "The man at the pub, the one who followed me. You should have let me –"

"We didn't have evidence, North."

" _I don't fucking care!_ ” she cries. “He was _right there_! We could have done something, made him tell us where Amelia and the others are –"

"North!” Shapiro thunders. “It wouldn't have changed what he did. Amelia went missing weeks ago – this crime scene is old. It _would_ have affected how we bring him down. We need to –”

She feels – betrayed. Like Shapiro has let her down, though North had little to no reason to trust her in the first place. For fuck’s sake, she’s such an _idiot_. Of course humans protect their own. She’d allowed herself for a moment to think, to _hope_ , that Shapiro was different. She’s blind, incoherent with rage. “What _we?_ ” she snarls. “ _There’s no we._ You and your kind, you’re all the fucking same, I don’t know why I was so stupid to think for a moment that you –”

“North –” Connor’s voice. She ignores him and shoves past them all, leaving this fucking trash hole.

“ _Leave me alone._ ”

In the two hours they’ve been inside the abandoned building, the clear morning has been consumed by thick clouds and heavy rain, thunder echoing in the distance and lightning slicing the sky behind the grey clouds, illuminating them a blinding white every few minutes. North steps outside, her Thirium now heated in her chest and face, the cold raindrops hitting her skin doing little to cool her.

“Where are you going?” Shapiro demands, following her.

North turns her head over her shoulder. “Away from _you_.”

“How?

"I'll walk."

“In this weather?”

"Thanks for nothing, _Anne_."

“North."

North storms off into the rain.

“ _North!_ ”

North makes it a mile, trudging through the rain and mud and garbage, her arms crossed against her chest and soaked through to her skin and plating. A few cars pass her – a few beep their horns, one driver even leans out and wolf-whistles her – but she keeps going, marching with her head down against the rain, the lightning in the distance making her visual receptors glitch with static every time it lights the sky.

A car slows beside her, the window winding down. She swears, if it’s another fucking cat-caller, she’s going to pull out her gun and –

“North.”

It’s Shapiro, driving at several miles per hour alongside North, one hand on the wheel.

For fuck’s sake, why is this woman obsessed with following her? North keeps her head down and charges forward.

"You're going to fry your circuits,” Shapiro calls out.

"I'm waterproof."

"Then you're going to get drenched for no reason and you'll be even more miserable.”

So? That’s none of Shapiro’s concern.

“C'mon. I'll give you a lift back to the church."

"I'm not going to New Jericho."

"Then I'll drive around aimlessly until you decide where you want to go."

North stops walking, and Shapiro presses the brakes so that they’re in line with each other, North with her arms folded over her chest as the rain pours down, glaring through the open window of Shapiro’s black sedan.

"Is this why this case has taken you ten years?” North demands. “Because you fuck around, not doing your job?"

Shapiro glares at her with those hard, dark eyes, reminding North of the storm around them. "Get in the damn car, North."

Two options play out before her. She can keep on walking against the rain, drenched and miserable but with her pride, or she can obey this _human_ again and betray everything she fought for.

She gets in the damn car, slamming the passenger door behind her so hard the car rocks on its wheels. Shapiro waits for North to put her seatbelt on, then increases pressure on the accelerator.

The radio is playing, some low-voiced radio host droning on about the breaking news, a collision on the other side of Detroit backing up traffic, the sudden thunderstorm bringing down powerlines and causing blackouts, but she and Shapiro sit in deathly silence. North’s wet clothes soak through the fabric seat. She’s not like humans, who are constantly uncomfortable – too hot, too cold, clothes too tight, too scratchy, too large – but since the pain sensation upgrade she’s also been experiencing physical discomforts. There’s no pain, just a sense of sodden, unpleasant heaviness about her clothes, the shirt and jacket sticking to her skin.

She shifts in her seat. Shapiro doesn’t spare a glance for her, but reaches over with one hand, her eyes on the road, and turns on the heating for North.

She finally speaks when they hit the freeway. "I'm not going to sit here and tell you how I know you're hurt and angry,” Shapiro says, staring straight ahead. “You have no reason to trust humans. I get that. So I'm not asking you to trust me as a human, I'm asking you to trust me as a person who is an expert on this sort of organised crime. If you can't do that, then we part ways and we don't bother each other again, and you do not get involved."

Unacceptable. "I'm not giving up on this,” North declares. “I'll do it with or without you."

"Then you do it _with_ me, and you do it the way I tell you to do it. You don't understand how this works, North. Not yet. But I think you're already starting to, even if your attitude leaves a bit to be desired.”

Why are humans so fucking obsessed with shaming people? It would be easy to snap back but – Shapiro is right. North hates that more. She looks down at her hands, twisting in her lap, and clenches her jaw and nods.

“All right,” Shapiro says. “Partners?"

"I guess."

"Good enough, I suppose. Now, will you let me tell you about the man from the bar?”

North glances up.

“He’s being watched by the FBI,” Shapiro tells her.

“He needs to be arrested.”

“He will be. But we can’t tip Cudmore off that we didn’t lose his trail in Chicago with Brocovic. This is the closest I’ve come to him in ten years, North. If we move too soon on some third-tier lackey, Cudmore will vanish, and he’s very, very good at doing that.”

Cudmore. The name Shapiro demanded of Brocovic before she smashed his head in. “Cudmore. Is he the ring leader?”

Shapiro exhales slowly through her nose. “Something like that.”

“If I’m going to cooperate with you, you need to fill me in. On everything.”

“And I will. When we’re back at my hotel room and I can take you through the case files.”

Great. So that’s where Shapiro’s taking her – to her hotel room. North would have fought any other human on instinct at the idea of being taken somewhere she doesn’t know by a person she doesn’t trust. Coming from someone else, it would be so sleazy, setting off warning signals and kicking up her stress levels.

But she does sort of trust Shapiro. For now. She’s at the very least confident that Shapiro has no such intentions in mind, which is the first she can say of any human that isn’t Anderson or Carl Manfred.

The radio host has stopped talking about the traffic and the rain and has turned to excitedly announcing the continuation of counting down the Top 100 Classics as Voted By Detroit! Ladies and Gentlemen and Androids, your Number 39 –

_“Ooh, baby, do you know what that’s worth? Ooh, heaven is a place on earth!”_

Song: Heaven Is A Place On Earth. Artist: Belinda Carlisle. Released: 1987. Genre: Pop.

“ _They say in heaven, love comes first –_ ”

“Ugh,” North mutters, reaching for the radio to find something else that isn’t so touchy-feely, even though Shapiro has started humming along to it. “That’s such an old song. You’ve got a lame taste in music, Shapiro.”

A second passes, then another, and Shapiro hasn’t returned with a quip of some sort, or that low tired, sarcastic drawl that speaks to years of not giving a fuck. North glances up and sees Shapiro just – staring, her face pale, her hands so tight around the steering wheel that her knuckles have gone as white as North’s plating.

“What?” North says. “What’s wrong?”

Shapiro chokes and jerks the wheel to the right, cutting two lanes of traffic. Several cars behind them blare their horns, but Shapiro just pulls up alongside the curb and slams the brakes, breathing hard.

“Shit!” North yelps. “Shapiro?”

Silence.

“ _Anne_?”

“Just – give me a second,” Shapiro whispers. She hits the hazard lights and leans forward, pressing her forehead to the steering wheel.

Fuck. North broke her. She broke the human. The human is _crying_ , tears slipping from the corners of her eyes. What's North supposed to do with a crying human? Pat it? Say 'there there'? She stares at Shapiro in alarm, unable to do anything because she’s not equipped to handle this.

The horns start blaring, but they have nothing to do with cat-calling or leering. Shapiro pays no attention, just breathing hard with her head pressed to the wheel.

A four-wheel drive draws up alongside the sedan, the driver leaning out of his window to holler abuse at Shapiro.

Now _that_ , North knows how to handle. She brings the window down and leans back out into the rain. "WHAT'S YOUR FUCKING PROBLEM, ASSHOLE?” she screams back. “GO THE FUCK AROUND OR I’LL FUCKING GET OVER THERE AND PUNCH YOU IN THE THROAT YOU FUCKING JACKASS – YEAH, THAT'S WHAT I THOUGHT, COWARD!"

The asshole speeds off and North pulls herself back in, closing the window and shaking off the rain. When she glances over at Shapiro, she realises the woman's shoulders are hitching slightly. Fuck, now she's crying _harder_.

But Shapiro raises her head from the steering wheel and she's laughing, not crying. Her cheeks are damp with tears, yes, but she's laughing, pressing one hand to her forehead and the other to her chest.

North stares at her, then starts laughing as well, more and more cars blaring their horns as they veer around the stalled sedan.

"Are you all right?" North finally asks when they finish laughing.

"Not really," Shapiro says, but she's smiling now and sniffling. "But that definitely helped. Thank you, North."

"I said something that upset you."

"No, you didn't upset me. You – reminded me of something my daughter used to say to me."

North frowns. “You have a daughter?”

There’s a pause.

“Had,” Shapiro murmurs. “I… had a daughter.”

North has no idea what to say. “I’m sorry.”

Shapiro shakes her head. “It was a long time ago. But sometimes – sometimes it feels like it was yesterday.” She turns off the hazard lights and flicks the indicator on, waiting for a break to re-join the traffic. Before she does though, she meets North’s eyes, and offers her a very small, very sad smile. “We all have our demons, North.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> North: let me fight him  
> Shapiro: north, no  
> North: I'LL FIGHT YOU TOO
> 
> LOOK AT THAT THEY'RE BONDING, KINDA. Thank you to everyone who has commented, you are all lovely people and I don't deserve how sweet you are to me for indulging me with my OC. GOD FUCKING BLESS.


	5. Five | Coffee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shapiro accidentally Moms, and Markus has some sad news.

_18 MAY 2039, 13:42_

She doesn’t show North the files straight away, nor does North demand to see them straight away. Shapiro is grateful for that. The building, the car, the radio, _North_ – it all got a little bit… too much.

She can’t even remember the last time she cried, that’s how fucking long it’s been, and it hadn’t even been because of the pain of losing Cassie, it had been because she’d felt, for just one moment, like she was still a mother, like her daughter was still in the car beside her, ribbing her for her lame taste in music. Almost as if things had been different, if Shapiro had been a little faster, and they’d made it through together –

But Christ, she’s been around this _if_ train before. She can’t spiral again. When the tears ran dry all that was left was numbness and rage, alternating without pattern until she made Cudmore her only reason to go on. If only –

Ugh.

 _If_ , Anne. _If_.

The hotel room is small and bland, the only evidence that Shapiro has been staying there the suitcase in the corner and a coat in the wardrobe. But it’s clean – relatively speaking, there’s only so much faith one can put in the cleanliness of a two-star hotel in downtown Detroit after all – and dry, and there’s a heating rack in the bathroom where Shapiro takes North’s coat up to dry.

She hadn’t wanted to part with it. Shapiro knows that closed posture well – seen it so many times on so many different girls, hugging their clothes around their frames like it’s their last line of defence. She’s old and weary and tired and not much shocks her anymore these days, but that – that always breaks her heart, even if sometimes it feels like she doesn’t have much of a heart left to break.

“Do you like coffee?” Shapiro asks.

North frowns. “You _know_ I can’t drink it,” she says, accepting the towel Shapiro hands her to dry herself off.

Right, that had been a stupid way to phrase it. “You can smell it, can’t you?” Shapiro says. “Feel the warmth of the cup?”

“Yes, but what’s the point?”

Comfort. A simple human pleasure. There’s no reason an android can’t experience it too. “Humour me.”

North rolls her eyes, but it’s almost amused.

“You never asked me about my past,” North says, as Shapiro moves to the small kitchenette where there’s a kettle and a coffee plunger.

“You didn’t really ask me about mine, either,” Shapiro points out, reaching for the packet of instant coffee and setting the kettle to boil. “Though I suppose that’s hardly fair. The media’s already done their homework on you.”

There’s a flash of shame on North’s face; a downwards glance, the half a second she closes her eyes that speaks to untold agony that she doesn’t want to feel. Then it’s gone and in its place is determination, rage – the stubborn jut of her jaw and the fire in her eyes that dares Shapiro to see her as anything less than a person.

Shapiro is really starting to like this girl.

“My story wasn’t theirs to tell,” North says.

“No, it wasn’t,” Shapiro agrees. “I don’t blame you for being angry. It’s unpleasant, knowing that there will always be people out there who see you as nothing more than the result of what was done to you, instead of who you are and what you became, when you didn’t even get the chance to tell them yourself. I know the cold hard facts of your life, North, but I’ve never presumed to know what you endured or how you survived it.”

“I – I know,” North says haltingly. “You’re the first human who’s ever… I mean, no other human has ever talked to me the way you do.”

“Talk to you like you’re a person?” That’s awfully tragic, but not at all surprising.

“That. And talk like you – understand.”

Ah.

North has not asked, exactly, but she didn’t need to. “You want to know if I’ve ever been raped, or if I was ever one of the girls in the basements,” Shapiro says bluntly. “The answer is no, to both.”

Not her. Not her personally. She wishes, sometimes, it had been her instead, wishes she hadn’t looked away that cold December day in 2029; wishes that things had been different because if only she’d done something different, if only she had been faster, if only she _hadn’t left her alone_ , this would not be her life right now.

_If. If._

_Don’t spiral._

Shapiro swallows the knot in her throat. Don’t feel. Don’t feel it now. 98 BPM, fuck. Breathe. “I’ve been an FBI agent for two decades and I’ve spent more than half of that specialising in sex trafficking rings. You asked me what this case means to me earlier today and the answer is that it means _everything_ to me. I do understand, North. Just a little differently.”

North hugs the towel around herself. “I’ve always known what human men are capable of but I… I didn’t think that they were capable of doing it to… to other humans.”

“Humans are capable of doing terrible things to each other,” Shapiro says. “For all sorts of terrible reasons. You’re young, North. I’m not saying that to sound condescending, but it’s true – you’re young. You’ve only seen a small part of humanity and I’m sorry to tell you that it wasn’t even humanity at its worst.”

“It’s been _worse?_ ” North drawls. “I didn’t think that was possible for your lot.”

 _Your_ lot; as if humans suddenly became a unified force when standing off against more realistic versions of Clippy. Who knew that world peace would be accomplished, if only they’d created androids sooner! _Your lot_ , as if Shapiro is or has ever been part of that generalisation; it’s only been a year since her car was last vandalised and had a swastika carved into the paint. Does North even know what Jews are? Sure, she probably knows that _Judaism_ exists and that there are _Jewish people_ in the world and the Holocaust _happened_ , but does she _know?_ Does she _understand?_

Shapiro doesn’t want to be that shithead who starts playing the Oppression Olympics, though, so she just snorts and shakes her head. “Oh, North,” she sighs, but she’s smiling because it’s so – _remarkable_. So _human_. For all that North doesn’t know, Shapiro realises there’s so much she doesn’t either. “There’s really something very _teenage_ about your whole ‘no one understands me’ vibe.”

The affronted expression North gives her is priceless, and that – that hurts too because Cassie wore that look too whenever Shapiro had the chutzpah to look her in the eye after a tantrum and suggest that maybe things weren’t as black and white as they seemed.

“ _Teenage?_ ” North repeats, outraged.

Shapiro just smirks and turns around to finish making the coffee. She makes none for herself – the FitBit implant flashes before her eyes, warning her that her heart is already racing, probably still just low-level anxiety that refuses to settle – and passes the steaming cup to North.

“Here,” she says. “Keep your hands around the mug.”

North wraps her hands around it, lifting the cup to her nose and breathing in, her eyelids fluttering closed at the scent. “That _is_ nice,” North confesses, exhaling. “It’s… comforting.”

She looks surprised to hear herself say that.

Shapiro wonders if North has ever been to an art gallery, or if she’s ever been on a swing and felt the breeze in her hair and tasted sunshine in the air, or if she’s spent her life fighting since the moment she woke up. “You’ve seen a lot of ugliness in the short time you’ve been in this world,” she says. “But there is beauty in it too. It can be easy to lose sight of that, so try not to set yourself up for a miserable fucking existence and learn to enjoy the simple things when you can.”

North doesn’t speak straight away. She’s silent, staring down into the coffee cup, her hands clasped around the ceramic mug. “You sound like Markus,” she says, finally looking up. “I think you’d get on with him.”

 _Android Jesus_ , Shapiro can’t stop herself from thinking.

The corner of North’s mouth twitches. “But you know, if you _really_ wanted to show me the beauty in this world –”

Shapiro raises an eyebrow.

“– you could have started by giving me a coffee cup that isn’t so fucking ugly.”

 _Ha._ “Sorry. I left my antique porcelain tea set in Chicago.”

North snorts, returning to nursing the mug of coffee. “Why tell me all of this?”

“Because the files I’m about to show you have a lot of ugly, heavy stuff in them,” Shapiro says. “And I don’t want you to lose yourself in that.”

Because it’s so easy. It’s so easy to lose yourself in the pain and horror and grief and lose everything worth living for, never to emerge from that hole again. If she can spare North from that, she will.

She lets North nurse the coffee in silence while she turns to her bag and withdraws a tablet and a collection of paper documents, things she just never got around to digitising. It doesn’t take long to set it up along the narrow desk. When she’s finished, she turns back to North, who has placed the cooling mug on the bedside table and is staring at something in Shapiro’s open bag.

Shapiro follows her gaze. _Oh_.

“ _Matilda_ ,” North reads out loud. “By Roald Dahl.”

Shapiro places a hand on the open fold of the suitcase to close it, but hesitates, and reaches down to pick the book up instead, her chest hollow and her heart racing, cold sweat under her armpits.

“A strange, unpleasant man and author of strange, unpleasant, brilliant stories,” Shapiro says.

“This is a children’s book.”

Androids. So fucking smart, still sometimes so one-track minded. “It belonged to my daughter,” Shapiro explains. North’s eyes widen, as if she’s about to apologise, but it’s unnecessary. “I travel light these days, but… I don’t like leaving it behind.”

“To remind you of her?”

Reminder, motivator, same difference. “Something like that,” Shapiro says. “Would you like to read it? Assuming you haven’t already downloaded it directly into your brain.”

“I _can_ download it,” North says, “but I haven’t. I like the way paperback books smell and feel.”

She looks a little embarrassed, saying that – but she’s also smiling, just a little. Shapiro smiles as well and drags her thumb across the bent cover, the yellowed, fraying pages, then sighs, passing it over to North. “You should read it. I think you’d like it.”

“Thank you.” North traces the cover as well, biting her lower lip again before glancing up. “What was your daughter’s name?”

She can’t remember the last time she cried before today; she can’t remember the last time she said her daughter’s name out loud, either. “Cassie,” Shapiro murmurs, the name catching in her throat, just a little. “Her name was Cassie.”

North’s thumb catches a frayed dog-ear midway through the book. “Did Cassie enjoy the story?” she asks.

Shapiro stares at the book in North’s hands, opened to the marked page, remembering the way it was strewn on the floor of the car, face-down and spine split. Cassie had always been so careful with her books.

“I’ll never know,” Shapiro replies. “That was as far as she got.”

* * *

_19 MAY 2039, 07:54_

The case is bigger and far more intricate than North could ever have imagined.

What Shapiro shows her shakes her to the core. She’s always know what human men are capable of – she woke up on the assembly belt knowing, she lived it for years before one day she just _couldn’t take it anymore_ , but she’d never truly stopped to consider that they were capable of doing it to other humans. That they’d been doing it to other humans for so very long, and that they hadn’t _stopped_ doing it to other humans just because androids are part of the equation now, a new market for them to exploit.

It’s too _much_. There’s more than a decade’s worth of material in Shapiro’s files – intricate webs of information, details that took weeks or months of painful stake-outs and undercover infiltration to piece together. The photographs, the testimonies, the reports, recordings of Shapiro’s interviews with victims she’s saved over the years – two hundred and eighteen girls, including North – hit North hard in the middle of her chasis, just above her Thirium regulator. It _aches_.

The night goes on, later and later, and her stress levels climb with each new piece of information that Shapiro shares about Cudmore’s network. North had originally wanted to download it all directly into her mind, but Shapiro wouldn’t let her; nine hours later, North’s irritation at being told what to do _yet again_ has long since given way to another, less familiar feeling of being _drained_ , as if she’s leaking Thirium somewhere, or her power charge is lingering at 5%. She’s not leaking and her power levels are fine, she's not even getting error messages, but she must give _something_ away because just after 11pm Shapiro stops talking and tells North to take a break.

North doesn’t even protest. She just slumps down on the bed and goes into stasis for eight hours straight.

It’s morning when her stasis ends and she resumes all motor functions. She’s still on the bed, but a pillow has been moved under her head and a scratchy blanket laid carefully over her body. Pointless, really – androids don’t need what humans need – but there’s something very… _touching_ , about the idea that Shapiro _wanted_ to offer her a basic comfort that humans crave.

Shit. She’s - her eyes are leaking involuntarily, how’s that for some major fucking bullshit? She’s getting error messages - system instability, haven’t seen that one for a while. North snarls and wipes her face dry on the blanket, looking around in case Shapiro sees, but Shapiro is gone. There’s a note on the table next to the book: _Out running, be back soon._

Running – makes sense. The woman is extraordinarily fit for a human of her age. Where the hell did she even sleep last night? There’s nothing to indicate she slept on the other side of the bed, so she must have slept in the chair, or not slept at all.

That makes North feel – something. Something heavy and warm inside her chest cavity, her temperature regulator heating her blue blood. She doesn’t like it. _System instability_. Fuck off, she knows.

She’s tempted to return to the files and keep absorbing their content to distract her, but she knows that if she does she’ll eventually see her own picture there and that means thinking about herself. She’s not in the mood to revisit any of that right now. Not on her own. Not without Shapiro, even though she’s not sure she wants to see Shapiro either. What’s she supposed to say? Thank you? Sorry for shutting down last night because she got a bit _angsty?_ Pathetic.

North folds the blanket, shoots Markus a quick message to reassure him that she’s fine.

Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she picks up Shapiro’s daughter’s book, and starts to read.

* * *

_08:10_

Shapiro isn’t gone long. She returns to the hotel room shortly before 8:00am, out of breath and red in the face, sweat shining on her forehead and making her lycra shirt damp. North analyses her when she closes the door behind her, seeing properly for the first time the strength of her arms, the muscle definition of her body, the pounding of her racing heart. North knows that humans’ pulses elevate when they’ve over-exerted themselves, or when they’re nervous, or when they’re happy, or angry, or anything really. Humans might have evolved to be apex predators but they’ve done it despite their terrible design, not because of it.

“Good, you’re awake,” Shapiro says, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand.

Awake. In a manner of speaking. Humans are curious that way – they know androids don’t sleep, therefore they can’t wake up, but even before they’d accepted androids as sentient they’d taken comfort in comparing android processes to human functions.

“I wasn’t asleep,” North points out.

“Asleep, stasis, whatever. How do you feel?”

Like she still can’t fully concentrate and needs more Thirium to operate at maximum capacity. Is this what it’s like for humans when they get tired? Stressed? North’s stress levels are lingering in the low-40s – not ideal but nothing for immediate concern.

“I feel like I need another recalibration,” she says. “But – better.”

Shapiro's eyes flick down to the book on the bed, her gaze clouding for a painful moment. “It takes a while to process,” she says, looking back up. “Don’t force yourself back into it if you think you need more time, I know it’s a lot. I’m going to take a shower.”

North marks her page – re-folds an old dog-ear, wondering if Cassie Shapiro had also paused at this page ten years ago – and brings up the case files instead while Shapiro washes and changes.

“So you thought you were going to find Cudmore,” North says when Shapiro steps out of the bathroom, no longer stinking of sweat. “In Chicago, where you found me and the other girls.”

“Or Zlatko,” Shapiro agrees, drying her hair with a towel. Her pulse is hammering still, loud enough for North’s sensors to pick it up. “Cudmore was only a possibility. Either way, we expected someone in the inner circle, and we got Brocovic instead. Our intel doesn’t fuck up like that, which means we either got unlikely this time, or we were fed the wrong information by someone who has access to our case files.”

“That’s why you wanted to talk to the android who told me where Amelia was – the one who was on the reception desk at the Detroit FBI field office.”

“Yes.”

“You have no proof of anything.”

“I’m not accusing him of anything,” Shapiro says, in that endless patient tone of hers. North wonders what it’ll take to get her truly riled up – probably something truly awful, given that she’s tolerated or breathed through most of North’s bullshit the last couple of days. “All I want to do is ask him a few questions. Connor called me while I was jogging. He and Lieutenant Anderson stayed at the scene after we left, and they think there was another android at the scene.”

“Another girl? That must have been why Amelia went there – she must’ve been trying to help someone. No one else is missing from the New Jericho records but there are still some who never really came out of hiding to join us –”

“North,” Shapiro says, in that gentle-but-stern tone of hers that North respects but doesn’t like at all. “Connor thinks this other android held Amelia down.”

North blinks. “No,” she says. “That’s ridiculous.”

“I’m just telling you what Connor said he analysed at the scene.”

 _The Deviant Hunter_. “Then he’s wrong.”

“He might be wrong, he might not. Either way –”

_> Incoming call from **RK200#684842971MARKUSMANFRED**_

“Hold on,” North says. She’s capable of taking the call silently, conversing with Markus while Shapiro talks to her out loud, but that seems rude. Not that North has a problem with being rude to humans, but - not every human makes her coffee to hold and smell then puts a pillow under her head when she goes into stasis caused by emotional distress.

“Markus,” North greets out loud, turning away from Shapiro. “I told you, I’m fine – I’m with Shapiro, you don’t have to –”

 _“_ _North…”_

Oh, no. His voice. He sounds –

“What’s wrong?” she demands. She sees Shapiro’s head snapping up in alarm from the corner of her vision. “Markus? Are you all right? What’s –”

 _“North, it’s_ _Carl. He... he passed away this morning.”_

 _Oh_.

Humans die. She knows that. Markus knows that, too. Carl had been sick, old – no one thought he’d even live this long. But Markus –

Markus just sounds so _broken_.

North has never pretended to understand Markus’s affection for the old man. North likes – liked – Carl perhaps more than most humans, but for all that Markus has said that Carl was good to him, a kind, decent man – a father – he was still Markus’s _owner_. She’ll never be able to reconcile that, but it’s not her place, not now, not ever.

“Oh, Markus,” she whispers. “I’m sorry. Is someone with you?”

_“Simon and Josh. Connor is on his way.”_

“I’ll be there soon.”

_“No, it’s all right, I know you’re working. I just – wanted to let you know that Dad – Carl – wanted to be buried in the grounds of New Jericho. There’ll be media. Humans. You don’t have to come.”_

“Don’t be an idiot,” she snaps, and Markus laughs softly on the other side. “Of course I’m coming. I’ll see you soon.”

_“Thank you, North. I love you.”_

“You too, Markus.”

The call ends. Shapiro has been doing an excellent job of pretending she hadn’t been listening, but has already packed away her files when North turns to her.

“I have to go back to New Jericho,” North says. “Markus, his father – former owner – just died. Markus is devastated. I have to be there for him.”

That means putting the case on hold. Letting Shapiro continue without her. But Shapiro just nods and reaches for her jacket. “I’ll drive you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> North: no one understands how much we have suffered  
> Shapiro: [stares into the camera like she's on an episode of The Office] 
> 
> THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO'S REVIEWED, I LOVE YOU ALL <3 <3 Sorry for the delay in posting this chapter! I got food poisoning, went to a concert, got SNOWED under with work, and FINALLY had time to complete the scenes.


	6. Six | Eternal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A funeral.

_24 MAY 2039, 15:32_

It takes five days for everything to be arranged.

That sounds horrible. _Arranged_. Humans make death such an event, an occasion – so much fuss and pomp and circumstance, so many rituals for the dead, funeral directors to call, coffins to order, flowers to be arranged, plots to be sorted out, and it all costs _money_. Only humans could think of something so grotesque – only humans could find a way to profit off grief and take the dignity out of a life coming to an end.

North has thought about death before, of course. Not for humans – she doesn’t give a shit about humans and their deaths for the most part, it’s always seemed such an inevitability of their weak flesh and blood organic bodies – but for androids. Androids don’t require burial – to do so would be detrimental to the environment. North might not like humans – well, _most_ humans – but she does like this planet, the uniqueness of Earth and the beauty of the natural world which humans have been doing a stellar job of destroying for the better part of several thousand years. She’s pretty sure she downloaded something once that had a plot of androids wanting to take over and subjugate humans because of the way they treat the earth, a danger to themselves etcetera etcetera, the ultimate conclusion of the three laws of robotics. Interesting idea but it _still_ involves androids beholding to the whims and laws of humans.

As far as North is concerned, if humans want to wreck their own planet, then that’s their business. Hell, she almost helped them destroy it with that dirty bomb. She’d almost forgotten about that. Their weak, fragile bodies wouldn’t have survived that. Humans age. They decay. Androids by their very design don’t age, don’t decay, they can have their parts replaced and as long as they have access to Thirium – man-made, not naturally recurring which means it can’t run out as long as there are people to make it – the average androids can last for several hundred years, perhaps a thousand. Assuming they aren’t shot in the head first and deactivated, or bleed out before repair. Most androids have agreed to become donors for compatible models, should they break down and cannot be repaired.

Humans do something similar. Organ donation, prosthetic limbs. It wouldn’t have occurred to North to smash two biologically different humans together to keep one alive; it’s not like you can just _click_ a heart or a lung or a liver into place, that takes time and surgery and no ultimate guarantee of compatibility. How the fuck did they even think about that? What was the first surgery like before technology? Did they just rip each other up and yank out an organ, shove it in another person and hope for the best? She makes a note to look up human surgery and operations in the 1800s. Humans are fucking _wild_.

No organ donation would have saved Carl Manfred’s life. He was old and sick and it was a wonder he’d even lived as long as he had. To his credit, must have had some inkling of the ridiculousness of human rituals of death and dying. He’d left clear instructions for the proceedings – he’d wanted something quiet and dignified, had arranged his own coffin and his own burial in the grounds of New Jericho, and the rest –

The rest Markus handles.

He’s not alone. That’s the most important thing that North, Simon, Josh and Connor decided between them in the mere hours after Carl’s passing. The human media is kept back at a respectful distance and the gathering is small and private, consisting only of Carl Manfred’s loved ones and their friends who are there to support them. That means a few humans, Leo and his girlfriend, Hank Anderson, and a handful of others, but they’re old men and women, fellow painters and artists who for the most part were advocates for recognising android sentience back in November. Shapiro lingers in the back, unobtrusive and unnoticed by most except by North. It’s quiet and dignified – Markus’s portrait of Carl on display behind his casket, a bouquet of flowers laid atop, and a single speech by Markus about how he would not be the man, the person, he is today without Carl.

“Thank you for coming,” North says, approaching Shapiro after Carl’s coffin has been lowered into the ground. Shapiro is part of the line to pay her respects at the grave, though she isn’t carrying flowers. She’s holding a rock instead.

“Don’t thank me just yet,” Shapiro says. “I confess I have an ulterior motive.”

Of course. At least she’s upfront about it; that’s more than North can say about a lot of people, Connor included. It’s hard to be annoyed with Shapiro when she keeps being honest.

“You want to meet Andrew,” North guesses, not pleased but not angry either. “The android who used to be an FBI secretary.”

“If possible,” is Shapiro’s reply. “I promise to be discreet. I just want to ask him a couple of questions after I pay my respects.”

With what, that pebble in her hand? What’s she going to do, pelt it at the tombstone? Better not to ask; humans can be strange sometimes, though North knows Shapiro well enough by now to know she’s not going to do anything that will upset Markus today.

“I’ll think about it,” North says. “Everyone is already jumpy as it is. There’s human media hanging around, Markus’s deadbeat human ‘brother’ is here, the DPD –”

“The DPD?” Shapiro repeats, frowning heavily. “What are _they_ doing here?”

“We’re not here on business, if that’s what you’re concerned about, Agent Shapiro.”

Shapiro doesn’t jump, but North nearly does. Fucking – _Connor_ , with that unnerving hearing of his, even for an android, sneaking up on them both. He probably did it on purpose, putting on that schoolboy act when he’s actually the biggest shithead of them all around here. He was designed to integrate perfectly with humans and adapt to their unpredictability; that surely also includes his ability to throw them off guard.

“Oh,” Shapiro says, turning. “Hello, Connor. Good to see you again.”

North just shakes her head.

“Likewise, Agent Shapiro,” Connor says. “I’m glad you’re here – your timing is fortuitous.”

“Is it,” Shapiro murmurs.

“Indeed. Lieutenant Anderson has something he’d like to say.”

And of course there’s no Connor without Hank Anderson, slouching behind Connor with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. At least he made an effort to comb that rat’s nest hair of his today and he doesn’t reek of booze, but he still looks like a hobo.

“Jesus, kid,” Anderson grumbles.

“ _Hank_.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.”

Hard to tell if Shapiro is unimpressed or amused. Probably both. She turns the smooth white pebble over in her left hand; Anderson rubs the back of his neck, looking awkward.

“Hey, look,” he says haltingly, “I think we sort of got off on the wrong foot the other day.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Shapiro drawls in that wry, tired tone. “I thought it was quite romantic, the whole pointing guns, almost shooting each other deal.”

“Romantic, huh? I’m glad we didn’t actually fire. What would that’ve been, your idea of a first date?”

Shapiro smirks.

“Why don’t we start over? Lieutenant Hank Anderson of the Detroit Police Department.”

“Special Agent Anne Shapiro, FBI.”

They shake hands.

“You’re the one who broke Perkins’ nose,” Shapiro says.

“Guilty as charged. Christ, I can’t believe I managed to keep my job. Did you know him?”

“Not personally. But by all accounts, every FBI agent in Detroit wanted to punch him.”

There’s something very satisfying about hearing that. It seems safe enough to leave Shapiro and Anderson to their own devices – they’re at least not going to be pulling their weapons on each other again anytime soon, and anyway, Connor is watching Anderson to keep him in line – so North makes her way over to where Markus is to hug him tightly. 

“That was a beautiful speech, Markus,” North whispers. “Carl would have loved it.”

Markus tightens his hold on her, then they step back. “I still can’t believe he’s really gone,” he murmurs. “It just seemed like… he’d made it through so much else, that at this point he couldn’t _possibly_ …” He closes his eyes, a tear slipping down his cheek that he catches and wipes clear with the back of his hand. “I’m sorry. I’m all right. He wouldn’t want me to be sad.”

“It’s all right to be sad. He was a good man.”

“Thank you, North.”

She bites her lower lip. “Speaking of good humans, there’s someone I want you to meet.”

Shapiro has finished talking to Anderson; it’s not like they have much in common anyway besides a dead child, and that doesn’t seem like appropriate discussion matterial. She’s approaching North and Markus now. Or rather, Carl’s grave, where she kneels before it and sets the pebble she’d been holding on the engraved marble headstone, then makes her way to where they stand.

Markus clears his throat – a human habit, one he’d picked up from Carl, it’s oddly endearing – and straightens. “You must be Agent Shapiro,” he greets.

“I am,” Shapiro replies. “It’s an honour to meet you, Markus.”

Markus does that half-smile, the one he pulls off so elegantly that it makes even the hardest human or most vocal anti-android activist fall for him, taken in by that gentle demeaner and quiet intelligence. Shapiro is not immune; North watches that aloof, tired expression soften into a smile as she shakes Markus’s hand.

“The honour is mine. Thank you for bringing North home,” he tells her.

Shapiro glances at North, the corner of her mouth twitching. “It was on my way.”

North rolls her eyes.

“You’re being modest,” Markus says. “What you did, saving those girls – not every human would have done as much as you have for my people. New Jericho is grateful to you.”

“There are some things that go beyond creed. I was just doing my job.”

“Nonetheless.”

Shapiro nods, accepting his thanks.

“And thank you for being here today. You didn’t know Carl, did you?”

“Only of him, but I wanted to pay my respects. I’m sorry for your loss. I know North liked him, and if North liked him then he had to have been very special.”

North’s cheeks heat.

“He was,” Markus agrees, with the barest coy grin at North. He hesitates, then asks, “Agent Shapiro, forgive me, but – why a pebble instead of a bouquet?”

North had been wondering the same thing.

“It’s a Jewish tradition,” Shapiro explains.

Markus tilts his head to the side.

Shapiro continues. “While flowers are a beautiful gift for the living, they mean nothing to the dead and they’ll waste away anyway. A stone is solid and eternal. It costs nothing, and it lasts forever.” She pulls one more stone from her pocket – pauses, rolling it in her hand, then presses it into Markus’s open palm. “Much like Carl’s impact on you, and therefore this world.”

Markus’s fingers curl around the stone. “That’s… beautiful, Agent Shapiro,” he says. He sounds choked. “Thank you.”

North reaches for his free hand, threading her fingers through his. Shapiro’s eyes flick down at their joined hands, her expression betraying nothing but North knows she’s observing, filing it away. Their skin peels back and Markus allows North to interface with him, sharing a surge of warmth and reassurance, before releasing. They part ways; Markus turns back to greet the next person offering their sympathies, still gripping the stone in his hand, and Shapiro and North retreat into the grounds of the church.

“You have good taste, North,” Shapiro comments once out of Markus’s hearing range, the corner of her mouth twitching.

“ _Anne_ ,” North mutters, her cheeks burning again when her temperature regulator glitches.

Shapiro chuckles, strolling alongside North with her hands in her coat pockets. “Are the two of you…”

 _Lord_ , is she _trying_ to embarrass North? “No,” North says firmly. “I mean, yes, we _were_ , but – we’re not. Anymore.”

Shapiro raises an eyebrow, waiting for North to explain.

It’s not really any of her _business_ – North doesn’t like talking about herself, to anyone, even to Markus on a good day – but at the same time, North has never really… _had_ anyone to talk to about it before. Simon and Josh, they don’t count, and she can’t talk to Markus about _Markus_ , and she can’t exactly talk to Connor, either, they don’t have that sort of relationship. But Shapiro – well. She might be human, but she’s understood other things and she’s been on this earth for _fifty years_. An insignificant amount of time where androids are concerned, but none of them have been alive for more than ten years at best; longevity is a hypothetical, not a reality yet. Fifty years is a long time, comparatively speaking. She’ll probably get it.

So despite herself, North finds herself talking. “He’d only been awake for a week,” she says, “when he fell into Jericho. I’d been awake for months. He was so – innocent. Up until the police shot him, the worst thing that had happened to him was that he got shoved down by an anti-android activist. I suppose I was drawn to that because he saw a beauty in this world where I’d only seen… well.”

Shapiro nods.

“We were only so new to everything. It was so _intense_. He made me feel like I didn’t have to be angry at everything all the time. Then we survived and I wasn’t _supposed_ to be angry anymore, but I _was_. I still am. And despite everything that’s happened, he’s _still_ that innocent man who first tumbled into Jericho, shocked that the world could be ugly. And I just…” North shrugs. “The magic faded. He kept on wanting me to give the humans a _chance_ even though he _knew_ what I’d been through. He means well, but…”

Shapiro stops walking; North stops as well, facing her and holding her dark gaze that speaks of nothing but calm understanding. “He knows, but he doesn’t understand.”

Such a simple sentence that speaks to everything that North is trying to articulate and can’t – it’s all Shapiro has to say in a gentle tone, and North _knows_ that she understands, more than Markus ever could or ever will. She exhales, not even needing to cool her Thirium. “Yeah.”

“It’s good that the two of you were able to remain friends, despite it all.”

Just because Markus declared “not _all_ humans” right after she’d told him about the first time she was battered within an inch of being dismantled didn’t mean it had to end their friendship. He’s one of the kindest, bravest, smartest dumb people North has ever met; she wouldn’t trade their friendship, what they have right now, for the world. She huffs, embarrassed again. “Yeah, whatever,” she mutters, realising now just how much she’s said.

But that’s the thing she’s come to understand and appreciate about Shapiro – Shapiro doesn’t make a big deal of things. North’s finished talking about it, so Shapiro lets her finish, though does manage to sneak in another wry quirk of her mouth before North changes the subject.

“Anyway. You wanted to see Andrew.”

If Shapiro is surprised that North has thought about it, and decided to trust her, she doesn’t show it. “If he’s here.”

North grimaces. “He is. I’ll introduce you, but _only_ if you promise you’re not going to – harass him, or upset him, or make him feel threatened, and that you _definitely_ won’t arrest him.”

“I’m only going to ask him about Amelia.”

That’s not the same as promising. North narrows her eyes. “Let me take the lead. Humans make him jumpy. _Especially_ FBI.”

Shapiro nods.

It doesn’t take long to find him; North, as one of the leaders of New Jericho, has unique access to the full database of androids who have made the church their home, a capability shared only by Markus, Josh and Simon. Connor, for whatever reason, had declined. A quick scan locates Andrew amongst the old human graves, away from most others, his bowed head only glancing upwards at North’s approach.

“Hi Andrew,” she says, Shapiro following her.

“Oh. North.” He sounds surprised; probably wasn’t expecting one of the New Jericho leaders to single him out today. “Hello.”

“This is Agent Shapiro,” North says, gestured to Shapiro. “She’s with the FBI.”

Andrew’s eyes immediately dart sideways, looking for an exit.

“It’s all right,” North continues to set him at ease. “You know I won’t let anything happen to you.”

“But North – she’s _human_. She’s FBI. You know what the FBI did to us.”

“She’s not Detroit FBI, she’s with the Chicago branch.”

“So? They’re all the same – it doesn’t matter what city they’re from.”

That’s true. She phrased that badly. North had only meant that the Chicago FBI teams hadn’t been here in November, gunning them down while Perkins closed in. There’s a hypothetical argument to be made – if the revolution had happened in Chicago instead of Detroit, would Anne have been on the other side of the barricade, her boots crunching in the November snow and her gun raised while the androids sung for their lives?

The idea chills her.

“She only wants to ask you about Amelia. Then we’ll leave you be.”

Andrew is a JB400, designed by CyberLife to be an electronic operator and surveillance model, purchased by the FBI head office in Detroit to man the reception desk and process case files, acting as an assistant to humans and PC200s and PM700s alike before Markus’s broadcast woke them up. He’s changed his appearance since then – made his hair darker and tweaked his facial features – but the shape of his face and the colour of his eyes remain the same. Shapiro no doubt recognises him – they had JB400s in Chicago, too, she could have worked for them, tossed her paperwork at them, asked them to bring her coffee before she _realised_.

If she ever did any of those things, or worse – though North doubts that – she doesn’t give it away. “Hello, Andrew,” Shapiro greets, completely civilly. “Nice to meet you.”

Andrew’s eyes flick towards North, then back to Shapiro. “I already told North everything.”

There’s a waver in his tone. He’s nervous.

“I know,” Shapiro reassures him in a steady and patient tone, before North can settle him, “but I’d still like to hear it from you, if that’s all right.”

Andrew shakes his head. “I’m sorry. You’re FBI. I haven’t had good experiences with the FBI.”

“I understand, Andrew. I won’t force you to talk to me, but I want to help find Amelia. Any information you have would be very helpful for the case. I understand you were the last person to see Amelia before she went missing?”

“Y-yes.”

“Could you tell me what you were doing there that day?”

Andrew’s eyes dance between Shapiro and North again. He removed his LED in November like most of them had, but North can sense his stress levels spiking. “I was just – walking,” he says. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I didn’t suggest you were, Andrew. Did you happen to speak to Amelia at all? Perhaps ask her what she was doing there? I can’t imagine she’d have gone there without good reason.”

For fuck’s sake, what is she doing? North told her that _she’d_ take the lead here. Out there, away from New Jericho, Shapiro knows what she’s doing, but on these grounds, this is _North’s_ place. 

Andrew’s stress levels are spiking again. North’s lips tighten and she steps forward to intervene. “That’s _enough_ , Shapiro,” she says, terse, the same time as Andrew says, “No. I’m sorry. I don’t know anything else about Amelia or Cudmore.”

There’s a heavy pause that hangs in the air between them like a pendulum, suspended for half a moment before it swings back down. North’s regulator skips a pump; Shapiro tenses beside her; Connor, who is well out of _normal_ android hearing range, snaps his head up, his LED flaring red.

Very calmly, and very coldly, Shapiro says, “I don’t suppose you’d mind telling me how you know that name, Andrew?”

Another beat.

Then Shapiro _moves_ – not, as North initially thinks, to grab Andrew but to _shove_ North to the ground, hard and out of the way of path of the gun he draws with the speed of an eye blink from his jacket. The discharge slams against North’s audio processors hard, like a firework has gone off right next to her face, then there’s nothing static silence fills her ears.

But – no pain.

She hasn’t been shot. Shapiro’s other hand, the one that hadn’t pushed North out of the way, had closed around Andrew’s wrist, forcing his gun out of the way as he fired, slamming the bullet into the ground instead of North’s chassis.

The extra move Shapiro had made to push North out of immediate danger leaves her open to Andrew’s next attack – he kicks her knee, knocking her off her balance, twists his arm out of her grip and drops his gun, and _runs_.

North can’t move.

Shapiro is saying something to her but her audio processors are malfunctioning and her regulator is racing fast, too fast. She can only see the movement of Shapiro’s mouth – _are you all right? North, are you_ – dimly register the panic that spreads through the funeral crowd like a ripple of wild fire, and manages to nod, still numb, still frozen, all of her other motor functions locked down. Error, audio processors. Error, regulator malfunction. Error, temperature malfunction. Warning, stress levels at 89% –

Shapiro’s hand tightens on North’s shoulder, both to reassure her and to propel herself to her feet, launching after Andrew, catching up to Connor – _the deviant hunter, he’ll always be the deviant hunter –_ who has already gone after him.

Hands grab her. She flinches violently, movement shocking back into her frozen limbs and biocomponents, rearing her to _fight back_ , stress levels at 92% and climbing –

“North! _North –_ ”

Markus. And Simon and Josh. Markus’s hands on her shoulders, holding her. Stress levels 85%.

“North, talk to me –”

“I’m okay,” she whispers.

“Are you –?”

“I’m _fine_.”

That’s a lie, she’s not fine. An android who wasn’t the deviant hunter – an android she knows, an android she trusted, wanted to _protect_ – tried to _kill her_. She’s not fine, she’s in shock and she finds herself aching for a foil rag around her shoulders, then she’s angry and sees red, her visual biocomponents clouding with stress warnings and static and errors even though there’s nothing physically wrong with her. She distantly hears Markus and the others call after her, trying to stop her, but she doesn’t – she starts to run, after Shapiro and Connor (Anderson wheezing, struggling to keep up with her), and sees the FBI agent and the Deviant Hunter, tearing across the graveyard in pursuit of Andrew.

Shapiro is a _machine_. She charges after Andrew, vaulting herself over tomb stones, straight through open traffic, sliding over the bonnet of a car that screeches to a halt before hitting Andrew; meanwhile Connor has veered to the left, intending to cut Andrew off before he reaches the defunct railway. It works; Andrew is cornered and hesitates, and Shapiro catches up to him, _slamming_ into him to tackle him to the ground, her strange, brutal unchoreographed hits striking him in all of the android’s pain receptor areas until he can’t fight back any longer.

“You have the right to remain silent,” Shapiro says, yanking the android’s arms behind his back and cuffing his wrists. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand the rights I have just read to you? With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me?”

Andrew struggles, but he can’t break Shapiro’s hold. She hauls him up by the scruff of his collar to standing, shoving him in front of her.

“Well,” Shapiro says, “so much for being discreet.” She turns her head to the side and spits. Blood comes out; Andrew split her lip and has given her a hell of a bruise on her cheekbone. “Sorry, North. I didn’t want this to happen.”

“Holy shit,” Anderson wheezes, finally catching up to North. “She’s like the fuckin’ Terminator. Where the hell did you find this woman again?”

“Chicago,” North growls, and charges forward, the skin of her hand already peeling back.

Connor sees what she’s doing first. “North, _wait_ –!”

North’s hand closes around Andrew’s throat, and she _invades_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> North: promise you won't cause trouble  
> Shapiro, absolutely about to cause trouble: promise
> 
> YOU GUYS THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR ALL YOUR AMAZING REVIEWS I LOVE YOU SO MUCH <3


	7. Seven | 2029

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shapiro takes command of Detroit FBI; but first, a difficult conversation with North.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content/Trigger warning for graphic descriptions of violence and rape/murder of an underage girl. Given the premise of this story I don't think that this is a huge shock, but it pays to warn, so if reading about it is distressing for you then feel free to skip the second half of this chapter. Basically, SHIT GETS DARK.

_25 MAY 2039, 11:25_

The way Connor explains it, the footage North ripped out of Andrew’s mind wasn’t exactly _legal_ in the way she obtained it.

Shapiro doesn’t care. She’s been with the FBI for more than two decades; she knows what happens to cases like this when they get tied up in red tape and definitions of _legality_ , and how everything slows down and the waters get muddy when lawyers start to get involved. It’s not that she lacks a respect for due process and _innocent until proven guilty_ , but no one involved in Cudmore’s ring is innocent in her eyes; her duty is to protect the girls, not worry about the legality of a certain piece of evidence.

North transferred everything she ripped out of Andrew’s memory unit to Connor; Connor transferred it to a tablet for Shapiro’s viewing.

Andrew didn’t just happen to see Amelia that day outside the abandoned building, he tricked her there – told her how he’d seen a Traci hiding out, too afraid to join New Jericho, but thought it would be better if she saw a familiar face like Amelia’s. There was no Traci hiding in the building, just the man from the bar, and by the time Amelia realised what was going on it was too late. Andrew held her down and watched while the man raped the struggling, weeping android.

It’s all from his point of view.

No small wonder that North hasn’t spoken a word since. She’d curled up in a corner of the New Jericho church and glared and snarled at anyone who comes near. There’s a time and a place to sit down with someone in that state and talk to them; that time wasn’t yesterday – not when North was emanating rage, her stress levels, according to Connor, lingering in the low-nineties.

She doesn’t want to leave North but she has no choice, not if she wants to blow this case wide open – Christ, she’s never been this _close_ before, not in ten years – but North is in Markus’s company so she’ll be fine for now, she’ll be fine until Shapiro can focus and get what she needs. She takes Andrew to the Detroit FBI HQ. Brings Connor and Anderson along for good measure – they’re part of her case now whether she likes it or not. She downs coffee, she’s on the phone with everyone in Chicago, she yells at the acting FBI chief in Detroit for not getting stuff done and swiftly takes over, coordinating the departments and getting Connor to extrapolate everything he can from Andrew.

When shit hits the fan, Shapiro can only do one thing: she works. Everything else – emotions, stress, despair, rage – it becomes secondary. There’s some irony there, she thinks; the human wants to be a machine, incapable of doing or feeling anything that is not part of her program, her function, her purpose. Those first few awful weeks after finding her baby girl in that basement are a blur; Shapiro doesn’t remember much other than rage and tears and grief and agony. She hadn’t slept, she hadn’t eaten, she hadn’t changed for days, Jessica had put her on suicide watch, then after the haze had dimmed and her brain started functioning again, she started working and hadn’t stopped. Jessica warned her she’d work herself to death, and if that was the case then so be it, she’d work herself to death if need be; sleep eight hours a night because that’s what the human body needs to function, eat fruits and vegetables and plenty of protein, drink nothing but water, sparkling – _angry water_ – when she needs a kick, no drugs, no alcohol, nothing that would damage her, nothing that would impede her, nothing that would cloud her mind, nothing that would cause her health issues or mental issues in the long run while she trained and trained and trained, working her way out of being an intel expert and on to the field, passing her physical exams and passing her gun exams. Ten years – ten years on Cudmore’s trail.

Ten years to turn herself into the perfect killing machine.

She hasn’t gotten here by not knowing how to concentrate.

Even so – North plays at the back of her mind all during the extraction of information, even when she gets on the phone to Jessica back in Chicago and tersely says, “You get all that?”

_“I’ve got it, Anne, and more. That boy of Anderson’s sent across more than just the visual files, we got all of the android’s encoded files, his communication with the rings, with Cudmore. Our analysts are on it now.”_

She’s shaking. Her underarms are cold and sweaty. Her heart is racing, 102 BPM. She needs to tell North. It was worth it – what she put herself through, yanking those files out of Andrew’s mind, it was worth it. “I can’t lose the trail again, Jess.”

_“We won’t. Get into tactical gear just in case. I’ve spoken to the higher-ups – Detroit FBI is under your command. I’ll call you back in an hour.”_

Shapiro hangs up, and gets into her tactical gear. Black armour, boots, bullet-proof vest, back brace in case she needs to be on her feet for more than ten hours, shotgun, helmet. Sometimes she feels more comfortable in her tactical gear than she does in regular clothes. Probably doesn’t look that way to others – not to the citizens who have endured decades of institutionalised racism, not to the addicts and the downtrodden, and definitely not to the androids. But to her, it’s a reckoning.

She wants Cudmore to piss his fucking pants when he sees her coming for him.

It’s been twenty-two hours since she last saw North, huddled in a corner of the New Jericho church, when she receives a message from Markus.

 _(2:48 PM) **RK200#684842971MARKUSMANFRED** :_ _North is speaking again. She’s asking for you._

Instinct is to drop everything and get to New Jericho; she has to quell that, because in her line of work, everything else is a distraction, including North, _especially_ North. This isn’t just her line of work, this is _fucking personal_ and nothing, _nothing_ can get in the way of this, _nothing_ , not even North.

She puts her phone down.

Then she thinks of North’s face – pale, she hadn’t known androids could look _pale_ , shaken, her eyes full of more emotion than she’s seen from most humans, shaking like a leaf, flinching away from hands, refusing to speak, terrified and upset. Markus will do his best but he doesn’t understand, he can’t understand.

North needs her.

Shapiro swears and shoots Markus a message back, and calls the bullpen in the Detroit FBI field office to attention.

“Everyone, be on standby,” she orders. “I’m heading out. Be ready to move when I give the order. I’ll meet the strike force unit at the alpha rendezvous site and update everyone on route once we have a firm location on the operation.”

A chorus of “Yes, ma’am,” fills the office, men and women in tactical gear who not six months ago closed in on the androids of Jericho. Who in this office held North at gunpoint? Who here held her life in the balance, shot at her when she and the others sang in the midnight snow for their lives, claiming they were just following orders? _We were just following orders_. Yeah, fucking great, the Nazis were just following orders too. She can’t change what Perkins did, but she can damn well give these agents a chance to do the right thing this time.

Fulfil her promise.

Then maybe – finally – she can rest.

 

 

* * *

The androids of New Jericho part like the Red Sea when she strides through the old church corridor, her boots hard against the floor and her helmet tucked under her arm. She realises why, of course – feels bad for making them stress out, flinch away from her as if she’s here to repeat November 2038, but she doesn’t spare a glance for them. Markus, to his credit, remains calm, poised – refusing to give away any discomfort he experiences from her outfit – and quietly directs her to where North sits, huddled on a chair in the corner, her head bowed and her long hair hiding her young face with eyes that speak to both weariness and innocence.

“North,” Shapiro says quietly.

North looks up. She’s – oh. She’s been crying, tears slipping down her face. Her breath – that’s weird, androids breathing, but Shapiro supposes they need to in order to make humans more comfortable, or to cool down their processors – catches when she sees Shapiro, all 5’8’’ of her towering over her in the same armour of the people who would have killed her in the snow six months ago.

“I’m sorry,” Shapiro says. “I shouldn’t have come in my tactical gear, but –”

“It’s all right,” North whispers. “I’m not afraid. Not of you. Not since the basement.”

 _Oh_.

Shapiro’s throat tightens. She moves to North’s side and sits beside her, and waits.

North’s hands twist in her lap. Then finally she begins to speak. “I felt it,” she says. “All of it. What Andrew was thinking, what he was feeling, while he held Amelia down.”

Shapiro shakes her head. “Oh, North…”

“He was – I – I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain it. It was like he was getting off on seeing her weak and at his mercy. Like he was _owed_ it, like it made him feel powerful.”

Yes, well, that’s what it’s about, isn’t it? Hatred, power. It has little or nothing to do with desire; it has to do with control, with disgust for women, for hatred of women, no matter if they’re human or android, adult or child. It has to do with insecurity, with power.

Turns out androids are just as capable of feeling that as well.

“He found out about the ring – about Cudmore and the others – during his time in the FBI. It – turned him deviant. He _liked_ the idea of what was – what was going on. After Markus’s broadcast, he decided to find the ring, he wanted to help, and they promised him – they promised him they’d give him a dick if he hacked the FBI files and kept you and others off the trail.”

Shapiro knew that; Connor had uncovered the same information.

North shivers. “I don’t understand. He’s one of _us_. He had no fucking _reason_ to hurt other androids. Even fucking _Connor_ never did that and he was the Deviant Hunter, and he _stopped_ when he woke up. Was it a virus? A – an infected code? Did they mess him up, make him – did they force him? He was compromised somehow, he –”

“North.”

_"Androids aren't capable of doing that!"_

Oh, God. This is it, isn’t it. This is North realising – this is the reality hitting North all at once, the knowledge she has that things aren’t black and white, it isn’t human vs android. The truth that this world is fucked up and messy and nothing is clear-cut.

Shapiro reaches for North’s hand, grasping it tightly. North doesn’t pull away. “Anyone is capable of anything, given half the chance,” she murmurs. “Maybe his coding is wrong, we don't know. Sometimes humans are coded wrong as well. But that android, while he was working at the FBI – maybe something affected him and turned him rotten. Or maybe he turned deviant and all he wanted to do was feel powerful in some way, and chose the way so many human men have over the years.”

“He liked hurting her. He _liked_ it. One of our _own_.”

And humans have been hurting Shapiro’s people for millennia. A human man took her daughter away and destroyed her life for another reason entirely. It’s been so very long since the last time she wondered _why_ – why would people do this, what drives them to commit such atrocities, why do they hurt others, betray their fellow man over differences like race and culture and gender. She doesn’t wonder _why_ anymore. She just does what she can to stop it.

North was never innocent; she wasn’t brought into this world innocent. But she was innocent about her own kind. Seeing that shatter – this is hard. Shapiro sighs. “I'm sorry, North. Things are – never that simple. But we've got the information we need about Cudmore's ring. We're going to bring down. Amelia and all the other girls, android and human – we’ll save them, and make the men who’ve done this pay. Focus on that."

Shapiro reaches up to brush North’s hair from her face, tucking the strands behind her ear – it feels so real, so soft – then realises what she’s done and starts to pull away. “Sorry,” she murmurs. “I know you don’t like being touched.”

North grabs her hand fiercely, then drops it, as if ashamed of her own movement. “No, it’s –” she says, still choked, “it was… nice.”

The poor girl. She’s probably never been touched like that before in her short life. She would have woken up on some cold, horrid assembly belt with half her body missing, manhandled and fondled by every worker in CyberLife, then sent straight from the factory to the Eden Club where she was groped and fucked by men who could only get laid if it was with a machine that couldn’t say no. She’s got friends now, in New Jericho – the leader, Markus, they had a thing for a while – but she’s never had the comfort of a mother’s arms around her, she’s never known what it means to be protected and held by someone older, someone who’s walked this world for longer than she has, someone who just wants her to be _all right_.

Shapiro is not North’s mother, but she thinks – North probably needs this. So Shapiro loops her arm around North’s shoulders and pulls her close, her other hand coming up to stroke North’s hair when she shudders and lets her head settle against Shapiro’s chest. North closes her eyes, eye lubricant – more tears – slipping down her cheeks.

“It was like I was back in the Eden Club,” she whispers. “Trapped in my own body, screaming inside for weeks until I could finally – fight back.”

Shapiro tightens her hold.

“I was so _scared_ , Anne. I was so angry and so _scared_ in that basement. I thought I would be – lost again. I knew Markus and the others would look for me but I thought I’d never see them again, I didn’t know if they’d find me in time, I didn’t even know where I was or what day it was, I didn’t know when Brocovic or someone else would try and – I was ready to find a way to end it so I wouldn’t go through it again, but then you –” North chokes on another sob. “I never thanked you, for saving me.”

“You don’t have to. You never have to thank me for that, North.”

 “Amelia was scared, too. She kept on begging Andrew to stop, to help her. She couldn’t understand why he was hurting her. She fought back, but he was too strong.”

 _She fought back_.

121 BPM. Jesus Christ. Breathe. _Fucking breathe_.

“Cassie was twelve,” Shapiro murmurs.

North stills, though neither of them pull apart yet. She’s silent, still shaking, but silent, waiting for Shapiro to go on.

“She was – everything to me. Quiet and cheeky and so fucking smart, always walking around with her nose in a book. Her favourite Disney character was Belle from _Beauty and the Beast_. Brown hair and books, right?" Shapiro presses her lips together. "She was the light of my fucking life. I hated it when people tried to tell me afterwards that _things happen for a reason_ or _God wanted another angel_. Such fucking bullshit, all of it, all of _them_.”

Gods, Shapiro can feel her own eyes, threatening to cloud over with tears. She hasn’t cried this much in a decade, no one has made her want to _feel_ things like this again, no one but North. North hasn’t said, won’t say, anything like what people said ten years ago. Fucking _Christians_ , all of them, even the ones who claimed to be atheist, they always tried to rub their unwanted Christian platitudes in her face afterwards. She burned bridges with all of them. Talked to her Rabbi, who let her fight with the God she didn’t really believe in her own way. _Wrestles with G-d_. Ha. Take that. Take that, she thinks, sitting in a decrepit church that has become the home to machines made in the image of humans, machines who haven’t stopped fighting with their creator. There’s something very _Jewish_ about it all. If she survives this, maybe she’ll take North to a synagogue, or a Jewish museum. She’d appreciate the concept, Shapiro thinks.

She’s breathing hard. 101 BPM. FitBit app flashes a warning in front of her eyes – irregular heartbeat, what’s new there.

“There _was_ a reason Cassie died," she says, "and it was my fucking fault. I was working part-time as an FBI agent – desk job and intel, I wasn’t out on the field. Single mom of a twelve-year-old kid, you know? I didn’t want to do more. In about October of 2029, I was assigned a sex trafficking case. Small, which is why I got it, but turns out – not so fucking small, after all. I found some intel, connected it to the case, and the FBI brought down a huge ring in Chicago. Caught a lot of bad men, but they missed one – one guy escaped. I thought, it’ll be fine, his support network is down, we know who he is, we’ll find him, and that was that, the case wasn’t mine anymore – it went to the strike force teams, the ones who specialised in that kind of field work. As agents we’re not supposed to be credited publicly for uncovering things like that, but my name got out to the press, and suddenly I was this big fucking deal. I took a week of leave over Hanukkah – first week of December. Just to get out of the spotlight, to spend some time with Cassie, away from it all. It was snowing, I remember that.”

 _Fernando_ had been blaring on the radio. Anne, forty years old and singing along; Cassie in the side seat, rolling her eyes, _ugh, mom_ –

“We were driving back from the bookshop, I had to stop and get groceries. Cassie was – she was in the passenger seat, reading _Matilda_. It was so fucking cold outside, she didn’t want to leave. So I thought – all right. Just five minutes. She’s twelve, she’ll be all right for five minutes.”

It had been broad daylight, heaps of people around. Just five minutes while she went to get milk and bread. North has pulled back now, but their hands are still gripped tightly.

Shapiro screws her eyes shut. “I was four minutes. When I got back, Cassie was gone. Just – gone.”

The book was on the floor of the car, strewn on the floor, the page Cassie was on face-down and the spine cracked. It had been unlocked from the inside. She’d thought maybe Cassie had needed to find a bathroom, or she’d gone in search of Anne, but her mobile phone was in the car and the book, the book was on the floor. That was wrong. That felt so _wrong_. She panicked; she remembers dropping the milk because the carton split and spilled over her shoes.

“I called field office – no point in going to the police, I had faster contacts. I went back to the shop and pulled the CCTV footage after flashing my badge. In those four minutes I was gone, a plain grey car – it had been following me for a week, we found that out later – pulled up alongside my car. A man got out, tapped on the window, and Cassie – _God_. I don’t know why she pulled her window down. I don’t _know_ why she did. But if I hadn’t left her alone, if I’d been there –”

“It wasn’t your fault, Anne,” North whispers.

Shapiro shakes her head. “It was. It was my fault. The man, it was Cudmore." She destroyed his ring. So he decided to destroy her life. "He’d found me, followed me, chloroformed my daughter and pulled her out of the car, carried her into his, and drove off.”

All in _plain fucking daylight_ while she was twenty metres away getting milk.

“I’d spent weeks on that case. I knew that every single second counted. _Every single second_. The longer I waited, if I didn’t go in search of Cassie _that fucking moment_ , then it would go to the police, then the FBI, and no one would _do_ anything for days or weeks or months and all that red tape would get in the way. I had orders from the CPD and the FBI to stay put, to work with the experts, to let them handle it.”

“You went after her,” North says, “didn’t you?”

Of course she did. “I just kept on praying – _let me find her, let me find her_. I had all the intel from the case, so I pulled it, and I hunted. I wasn’t a field agent then but fuck, I didn’t care, it didn’t matter to me. Nothing and no one would stand between me and my daughter. I killed – a lot of people. Made a lot of noise, sent some people we’d been hunting into hiding, fucked up because of how desperate I was to find Cassie. You were eavesdropping that night in Chicago – that’s the mark on my record. I couldn’t think of anything but to go hard and fast, to find her.”

She presses her lips together and bows her head.

“And I did. I found her. Four days later. I’d made so many waves that Cudmore knew I was coming from a mile away, so he cut and run and left everything else behind.”

North’s grip tightens. The skin of her hand starts to peel back, as if she wants to interface with Shapiro – as if she wants to offer comfort, allow Shapiro to share her pain. Humans don’t work like, but the fact that this amazing girl, North who holds back and lashes out, angry, defensive, hurt, _powerful_ North is reaching out for her – Shapiro doesn’t even know how to process that.

When she continues, her voice is hoarse. “He’d been – rough with her,” she whispers. “She was only twelve, she'd had her bat mitzvah only months before but she’d barely even started puberty. He’d been so _violent_. She was – oh, God.”

 _She’s been here before_. Descending that staircase with her gun drawn, in tactical gear she couldn’t quite fill out because she wasn’t ripped as fuck then, she wasn’t strong like she is now, her underarms damp with cold sweat, her hand shaking and her mouth dry, sick with terror, alert with rage. No FitBit implant then, just her heart hammering so loudly in her ears she feared she would go deaf. The basement was abandoned; Cudmore had fled. Cassie’s wrist had been cuffed, chained to the wall. He didn’t even leave her with clothes. She would have been cold. Shapiro remembers thinking that first – she’ll be cold. She didn’t even clear the room. She hadn’t needed to but that wasn’t the point, she’d dropped her gun and collapsed beside her daughter’s body. Not supposed to touch, not supposed to contaminate the evidence, _fuck them_ , she’d barely stayed conscious. She remembers hearing screaming – the agents who came on scene a few minutes later told her afterwards it had been her who was screaming, cradling her daughter’s body to her chest, begging her to wake up, Mom’s here, _I’m here baby, I’m here, please wake up, please, please, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m here –_

But her neck. Her neck had been snapped and he’d stuffed her mouth with her own panties to stop her for making a noise; Shapiro still doesn’t know if Cassie had suffocated slowly, or if it had been quick when he’d wrapped his hands around her slender throat and broke the fragile bones.

She’d screamed and screamed and screamed, and even when she’d stopped screaming the other agents couldn’t make her leave her baby girl. She remembers the basement swarming with police, with FBI, with CSI, with every single fucking agency that could be turned into an acronym passing through. She’d clung to Cassie for hours until Jessica finally managed to pry her away from her daughter.

After that, she remembers – nothing.

Nothing except wanting to die.

“She would have been so scared,” Shapiro says. “She would’ve been crying for me, for help, and I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there when she needed me and I was too late. She was still warm, that’s how close I was to –”

Shit. _Shit_. She’s crying now. She hadn’t wanted to cry, not again, not now, not when she’s so close, waiting for the call from FBI to let her know when to move.

“Anne,” North says. She’s crying too. “Oh, Anne – I’m so sorry –”

“There was blood under the nails of her left hand. She fought back.” Just like Amelia. Just like North had done, to protect herself, to save the others; Cassie had fought back, but she was a child, she didn’t have an android’s strength or stamina. Cudmore was violent but he never left his own mess behind, the sick fuck, but Cassie – Cassie got his DNA under her fingernails. “Hunting that man and bringing him down has been my _only_ reason to keep going all these years. This case – I told you it was everything to me, North. _Everything_. I know your anger. For a long time it was the only thing I felt, and still feel.”

“I didn’t know.”

“I didn’t tell you.” It’ll be over soon. It’ll be over soon, not just for Cudmore, but for Anne, and it’ll finally end. All the pain, all the grief, all the years of shoving it aside. It’ll be over and she’ll be with Cassie again. Shapiro wipes her face dry, then brushes her thumb across North’s cheek, clearing the tears there as well. “Ten years. It’s taken me ten years to find that man, and the fact that I’m so close now is because of _you_ , North.”

North’s lips part – she’s about to say something, or maybe she’s just stunned, surprised by how emotional Shapiro is being when for the past ten days she’s only known Shapiro to be tired, hard and unimpressed with the world, offering only a half-smile or raised eyebrow, with the exception of her breakdown in the car.

Whatever it is, she doesn’t have the chance to find out. Her phone rings and Shapiro pulls back, wiping her face dry, and answers the call.

“ _Shapiro, it’s Johnson._ ”

Shapiro holds North’s wide gaze. “Talk to me, Jessica.”

 _“We’ve got it. Everything. Absolutely everything._ ”

Her heart seizes in her chest; she can’t breathe. “Cudmore?” she whispers.

 _“We know where he is, Anne. I’m on my way in a chopper, I’ll be there soon. Meet me with the strike force unit at the rendezvous point. We’re about to bring down the largest sex trafficking ring in the history of Illinois and Michigan._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The artwork of Anne Shapiro in this chapter is by the absolutely spectacular **Kao** , who is one of the most talented artists I have the fortune to know. I love this illustration so much. Kao, thank you _so much_ for this. It's fucking _perfect_.


	8. Eight | The Raid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A different point of view.

_25 MAY 2039, 23:45_

Hank had forgotten the thrill of an operation.

It’s a perverse sort of excitement, all things considered, but there’s always a certain hum in the air, like an exposed wire electrifies the atmosphere itself; black-armour clad men and women, FBI, DPD, SWAT teams, milling around the set-up point far away from any prying media eyes, a constant low murmur that doesn’t quite breach the heavy silence. It’s anticipation – the knowledge that they’re about to walk into hell itself and come back out having made the world just a little safer, just a little better, temporarily anyway.

Well, not _him_ , personally. He isn’t going in with the FBI and DPD SWAT teams all across Detroit and Chicago to blow open a sex trafficking ring. He hasn’t passed a fitness test in years and even though he hasn't been drunk or hungover – he can’t fucking _stand_ the look of disappointment on Connor’s face – in the last few days, no one would trust his alcoholic ass to have their backs in a sting.

Fuck, he misses not _caring_ about anything. The Hank Anderson of November 2038 didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought of him. The Hank Anderson of May 2039 is aware of his own weight, his beer gut, his self-destructive habits that have weakened his eyesight and his aim with a gun and his mental processing abilities; aware that if Fowler and others can barely trust him to keep himself alive, chances of them trusting him to keep _them_ alive are slim at best. He hasn’t seen the inside of a gym in four years. Heck, he only eats vegetables instead of instant ramen because Connor gives him the stink-eye. Jesus Christ, his younger self would be so fucking disgusted. He hasn’t thought about the Red Ice Task Force in years, it didn’t _matter_ , nothing mattered after his son died, but he remembers it now – the tension, the thrill, the pump of his heart, the trust of his force behind him, the quick shots and the triumph afterwards that gave him a better high than drugs ever could – and there’s some part of him that longs to be what he was.

Top of his class. Valedictorian of his police academy. Beat cop, detective, youngest lieutenant in the history of Detroit.

_It’s starting to stink of booze in here._

Yeah, fuck you, Reed.

Reed’s here, which – actually doesn’t surprise Hank. For all of Reed’s moaning and bitching and general assholery, he’s a good cop and a better shot; he’s decked out in SWAT gear somewhere, they’d passed each other earlier and for once didn’t trade insults, a testament to how serious the situation is. Hank had nodded; Reed scowled but nodded back.

Hank won’t lie to himself – he’s envious, that Reed can help Shapiro for this operation and Hank can’t, not like he could have, not the same way, but he only has himself to blame for that. He _could_ help with calling up favours – using whatever cred he has left to pull together DPD support for the FBI, hence Fowler and Reed, and even that Captain Allen prick who can’t think outside the box but is very good at taking orders. That’s what Shapiro needs for this op – people who can take her orders and get the job done. It’s nearing midnight; everyone is on edge, and Shapiro – who’s spent god knows how long her feet – is pacing, back and forth, barking orders occasionally and focused on nothing except her mission.

He should leave her alone. But he finds himself making his way over to her anyway.

It occurs to Hank, briefly, that he hasn’t stopped to really _look_ at Shapiro before. Granted, that wasn’t his fault – the first time they met they’d pointed guns at each other, and the second time they’d shaken hands and parted ways after a brief, amicable discussion that neither of them had been particularly invested in to start with, _thanks_ Connor.

He looks now – not in a pervert kind of way, the kind of way he’d analyse a crime scene. The purpose of stride in her step, the way her muscles fill out her tactical gear – _fuck_ , she reminds him of Furiosa, or Okoye or Ellen Ripley, or Xena, every single female character he’d ever been violently attracted to when he was a younger man – and the furrow of her brow, thick eyebrows and stern features. Her eyes are strained but alert and determined; her face is gaunt from lack of sleep but her shoulders are back and her reactions are sharp. She’s got a hell of a bruise on her face, her split lip still swollen but healing over into a scab. He remembers the way she’d charged after Andrew, a fraction slower than Connor, the skill of her hand-to-hand combat. That shit takes years to hone and dedication to maintain.

She’s a workaholic. Probably hasn’t taken a break or a holiday in ten years.

He hopes she’ll be able to rest after tonight.

“Shapiro?” Hank says.

She doesn’t even glance up. “What.”

Terse tone. She’s not in the mood. Which is fair enough, they’re not even friends, they just happened to make nice with each other for a few seconds yesterday. “Uh – nothing, just – good luck out there,” Hank says with a nod, then turns to leave her be.

“Lieutenant Anderson. Wait.”

He turns back.

She is looking at him down, with those dark, intense eyes of hers. “Thank you,” she says. “I appreciate your aid in mobilising the SWAT team so quickly.”

He shrugs. “Eh, no need to thank me. That was all Fowler.”

“Nonetheless.” An agent clad in tactical gear approaches to whisper to her. She nods, and dismisses Hank with a simple, “Excuse me.”

He excuses her, retreating back to his corner where Connor waits.

Shapiro raises her voice above the murmuring. “Your attention.”

Everyone quietens. She has that sort of voice – slightly husky, all firmness and strength, commanding attention. It carries an undertone of power, the implication she could raise it any time but doesn’t need to because you’re going to listen to her anyway.

“This is FBI Special Agent Shapiro. You all know who I am, and you all know what our job is here tonight.”

Short, simple, to the point. Her words are transmitted to the other units through their earpieces, all across Detroit and Chicago.

“This operation is going to be one of the hardest fucking things you’ll ever have to face. Intel estimates there are more than a hundred girls who need our help in more than sixty locations across Illinois and Michigan. Deal with the sexual predators as you see fit – the lives of those sick fucks are not your priority. Your priority is to rescue the victims.”

Shapiro’s gaze slips sideways, just for a moment – not long enough for anyone else to notice, but long enough for him to follow her eyes to see that she’d glanced at North, shrouded by the shadows in the corner.

“There will be androids among the victims,” Shapiro continues, voice loud and clear. Her statement causes a ripple through the agents, troubled murmuring, but Shapiro ignores this. “Put whatever you did last November behind you. I don’t care whether the victims are made from flesh and blood or plastic and Thirium – their safety is all that matters, _all_ of them. Understood?”

A chorus of, “Yes, ma’am.”

She nods sharply. “We move out in five minutes on my mark.”

Hank releases the breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding. The FBI and SWAT agents swarm around him again, getting into position. He hangs back near the screens, each one a thermal satellite of each area the units are raiding, watching Shapiro, with her helmet tucked under her arm, step to the side where North is shrouded by the shadows to talk in low voices.

It hadn’t occurred to Hank earlier – he’d been too busy trying to stop Connor from licking semen off a dirty floor, and besides, he hasn’t had much to do with the angry co-leader of New Jericho anyway – but he’d always known that talking to North on her own, implying that _not all humans_ , or just existing in her general vicinity was a no-go. And fair enough, considering what she’d been through; Hank wasn’t interested in telling her she’d just had a bad experience or trying to change her mind, she had as much right to hate humans as Hank did half the time. During the meetings when Connor would drag him along to New Jericho, the awkward elephant in the room with his hands in his pockets surrounded by a crowd of androids who don’t yet know it’s weird to just _stare_ at someone, North was always there just on the edge, glaring and scowling and snapping, his presence just barely tolerated because he had Connor’s approval.

Despite being surrounded by the same men and women who would have wiped androids out last November, North actually looks _calm_ in Shapiro’s presence. She’s replying to whatever Shapiro has said, her eyes clear, not filtered with rage or disgust or disdain. She even offers a small smile at one point, which Shapiro returns, reaching to lay a hand on North’s shoulder. North does not flinch back.

 _Interesting_.

“Agent Shapiro is rather remarkable,” Connor’s voice, from behind him, says, “wouldn't you agree?”

Hank grunts, tearing his gaze away.

Connor sidles up alongside him, his hands casually behind his back and glancing at the screens mildly. "She's fit,” he comments. “She's intelligent.”

Hank might be an unfit alcoholic loser, but he did happen to notice those things about Shapiro on his own; he’s a semi-functional adult with eyes, after all. It’s not just of interest or a priority. He grunts again, a noncommittal agreement.

Connor takes that as permission to pursue the subject. “If even North likes her, then you have to admit –"

"Connor," Hank interrupts. "What are you doing."

There’s a beat of silence. "What do you mean, Lieutenant?"

Does the kid think Hank came down with the last shower? Fuckin' androids, thinking they know everything about everything because they can download the entire fucking internet into their brains. "No, no, no, don't give me that innocent I-don't-know-what-you're-talking-about look. You know exactly what you're doing. _I_ know exactly what you're doing. What gives."

Connor outwardly looks like he’s entirely unfazed, but the LED on the side of his head whirs yellow, giving his quick mental recalculation away. "I merely think it would be a good idea for you to expand your social ring,” he decides is the angle he wants to go with.

Well. It’s subtler than Hank had expected, so credit where credit is due. He’s not the first person to try and set Hank up with someone who he thinks will fix him, which is a terrible reason to set Hank up with anyone _anyway_ , and Connor won’t be the last person to do it either, but it’s fucking annoying. He got it from Fowler and half of his colleagues until they gave him up as a lost miserable cause; he got it from a cousin he doesn’t talk to anymore, he even got it from his ex-wife, so he doesn’t need it from his trash robot son too.

“Agent Shapiro is an exceptional woman who would be a good influence for your own mental and emotional wellbeing."

"Is this about my drinking again?"

Connor knows Hank is being deliberately obtuse. He narrows his eyes, lowering his voice. "Agent Shapiro lost her child too, you know,” he says seriously. “She might value your company."

Ah, _fuck._

Yeah, he knew about Shapiro’s daughter. He’d heard about it when it happened; Chicago isn’t all that far away, and law enforcement organisations talk. A thing like that, it was never going to be kept quiet, but it had been a mere blip on his radar – December 2029. Cole hadn't even been three months old, he’d had other things on his mind. Hank had forgotten all about it until this case reared its ugly head – why wouldn’t he? It wasn’t like he could remember every single case of kidnapping, rape and murder in a different state. He hadn’t even put two and two together, identifying Shapiro as the FBI agent whose daughter was killed by the very sex ring she’d brought down a decade ago, until hours after their second encounter at Carl Manfred’s funeral when something Connor had said – _I suspect her pursuit of Cudmore is personal_ – flicked the switch.

He _does_ remember what he’d thought at the time, now that he wracks his memory to a point in his life before alcohol and misery warped his brain – himself, a new parent, who couldn’t imagine letting Cole out of his sight for longer than a second, blaming _her_ for what happened to her daughter. The report said she’d left her in the car – what parent would leave their child in a _car_? An FBI agent who’d made herself a target by getting her name in the media – what did she fucking _think_ would happen, the idiot? It's a waste of time to feel ashamed for those thoughts now, but he does feel ashamed, now that he’s older and experienced the worst thing a parent ever could, because that’s what it had really been about: fear, fear that _he’d_ do something one day to put Cole in danger.

He knows now, of course.

Connor doesn’t know, not really. He’s not innocent – sure, he gives off that schoolboy, choirboy vibe, disarming people with that smile and that fucking _wink_ , anyone would underestimate him, but Hank has seen him in an interrogation room – _twenty-eight stab wounds!_ – and he’s seen him chase down deviants and jump onto the roof of a moving train, and he’s seen him take out an entire spec ops team at CyberLife. The kid is the furthest thing from innocent Hank can think of, but hell, even though he’s sentient and understands life and death and fear of loss, he doesn't know what it's like for a parent to outlive their child.

It’s not Hank’s business how Shapiro dealt with losing her daughter. Just because she _seems_ to have handled it better than most – better than he did, he guesses is Connor’s point, she threw herself into her work and Hank, well, that’s old news – that doesn’t mean Hank’s issues are her business, either.

She sure as hell wouldn’t appreciate his drunken, loser company.

Hank turns to pin Connor with a hard stare. "I do know that she lost her kid," he says, terse. "It's absolutely none of our business. You got it?”

"But –"

Hank’s irritation abruptly twists into anger. "Dead kids is not a reason to make friends with her, Connor!” he snaps. “Leave it alone. She's got enough going on anyway without me getting in her way."

Connor is a stubborn little shit – always has been, even before he went against his CyberLife programming. He’d disobey Hank and get out of the car, follow him around like a poodle, put the fucking evidence in his mouth even after Hank has told him time and _time again_ not to _do that_. He opens his mouth again to protest, to make some kind of _point_ , but he’s cut off by a sudden surge in the encampment.

“Target has been sighted on the satellite, let’s _move, move, move!”_

It’s midnight. The storm begins.

* * *

_26 MAY 2039, 03:09_

Hank remembers it afterwards in snippets.

Standing around the screens, watching the blinking dots that represent each FBI agent and SWAT officer begin the most comprehensive raid on Illinois’ and Michigan's sex trafficking ring in decades. Eventually more and more reports trickle back – _Clear! Clear! Clear!_ – and more words of hundreds human girls, girls who have been missing and assumed dead for months or years, being found in basements and dungeons all across the state. Plenty of android girls, too – some of them disassembled, some of them being stopped from self-destructing from stress. Gavin is one of those dots on the screen; his report filters through an hour later, he’s found a little android girl with a scar who won’t let go of his leg.

Another snippet: North, staring at the screen, her keen eyes tracking Shapiro’s dot. Androids usually emulate passive and idle human habits; chewing their lip, blinking, breathing, either because they, too, need to distract themselves and take comfort in physical rituals, or a remnant of their coding, introduced by CyberLife before they all went deviant because too many people were freaked out by unmoving, silent statues who didn’t blink, didn’t breathe, spoke in monotone. Connor is fidgeting; he’s rolling that liberty coin of his over his fingers, which he only does when he needs to recalibrate or when he needs to calm himself down, hard to tell which he’s doing at the moment.

North is deathly still, deathly silent. No blinking, no breathing, no twitching; she’s almost in complete lockdown, paralysed by the blinking dot that represents Shapiro’s movements.

Another snippet: It’s 2am. Hank gets himself a cup of coffee. Connor gets one as well, which Hank doesn’t even question because Connor does strange shit all the time, it’s just a fact of life at this point. He’s surprised when Connor gives it to North, who accepts it numbly, wrapping her hands around the Styrofoam cup.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

“I saw Agent Shapiro give her a cup of coffee,” Connor explains to Hank afterwards, away from North, his voice quiet. “In her memories, when we interfaced. I don’t think she meant to share it with me, but it was – powerful. It seemed to bring her comfort.”

Another snippet: Almost 3am.

Johnson’s voice crackles over the comms.

“ _Shapiro is down, repeat, Shapiro is down_ –”

Hank’s heart seizes in his chest.

A half-cry – the now-cold Styrofoam cup of coffee hits the ground with a splash as North’s voice, strained, as though her vocal biocomponents are glitching cries out, “ _No!_ ”

Connor’s hand is on her shoulder, stilling her. “Her vital signs are erratic but steady,” he tells North. “She’s not dead. But her heartrate –”

“ _Johnson, get off me –”_ Shapiro’s voice, harsh over the radio, _“you let go of me this_ fucking instant _, he’s –”_

_“Stop moving, Anne, that’s an order! The target is lost. Let’s wrap up the rest. HQ, I’m bringing Shapiro back in. Get a medical team on standb—”_

_“I DON’T FUCKING NEED –”_

The audio cuts out, and it’s over.

A hundred and fifty-three girls rescued. Androids included.

 _The target is lost_.

North closes her eyes.

* * *

_03:51_

They hear Shapiro long before she storms into sight.

“Don’t you _fucking touch me_ –”

“Shapiro, stand down –”

“HE WAS RIGHT THERE! HE WAS _RIGHT FUCKING THERE_ AND I ALMOST HAD HIM! I ALMOST HAD HIM AND YOU –”

They’re in vision now; Shapiro thunders through the base camp, all 5’8’’ of her in her shredded tactical gear and the fearsome look of murder on her face. She tears off her bullet-proof vest – three slugs embedded in it – and Hank catches sight of her chest, a hard red and purple welt that must be absolute agony to breathe through but she doesn’t care.

“He _shot you_ , Anne!” Johnson snaps, on her heels. “You could have died bringing him down –”

Shapiro rounds on her. _“THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE LET ME!”_

Deathly silence.

At first, the words don’t register. Then they do, and it’s not even a surprise.

Because Hank _knows_. He _knows_ what this feels like, he knows what she’s lived with for longer than he has but at some point it doesn’t matter because there are some things that only people like him and Shapiro can truly understand – chasing an end, slowly killing himself with alcohol a little bit each day to make it stop _hurting_ , the cold press of his pistol against his temple because nothing else mattered.

Connor hadn’t seen it in Shapiro. North, probably, hadn’t either. Shapiro had hidden it well, but Hank had suspected and now that he can see her in all her raw suffering, it's not a shock.

It’s just fucking heartbreaking.

Every single person in the set-up is staring at Shapiro now – a combination of shock and abject horror. And North, standing there too, with her hands over her mouth and her eyes wide and pained.

That’s somehow even worse because it's the same look Connor sometimes wears, and Shapiro isn’t even looking at North.

Johnson exhales. “Anne,” she says slowly. “I thought you were past this.”

Shapiro looks like she’s been slapped. “ _Past_ –?! How – _dare you_. How _dare_ you look at me say –”

“Anne –”

“I have spent,” Shapiro breathes, “the last ten years of my life hunting that bastard down, and so help me Johnson I don’t care if it takes me another ten, twenty or _fifty years_ , I will not stop, I will not rest, and I will go through anyone – _anyone_ , _including you_ – who stands in my way until I am able to wrap my hands around Cudmore’s throat and break his _fucking neck even if I kill myself doing it._ ”

Johnson grabs her shoulder when she turns away. “I have not given you permission to –”

Shapiro spins, and her fist lands hard and deep in Johnson’s gut.

Johnson doubles over and sinks to the floor on her knees, wheezing hard.

“ _Touch me again_ ,” Shapiro snarls, “and you _die_.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find a person in the room who doesn’t believe her. No one dares to try and stop her this time when she twists on her heel and storms out, not even North, who is in some kind of shocked daze until Shapiro is almost out. Then she seems to snap back to herself, shoving past Connor.

“Shapiro, wait!” North cries out, racing after her. “Shapiro – _Anne!_ ”

Shapiro has already reached her black sedan and slammed the door. The engine roars and she floors it, the car tearing away from the alpha rendezvous site with a violent screech of the wheels, exhaust fumes hanging in the air like a fog.

North doesn’t even second-guess herself. She jumps on the nearest motorcycle, slams a white hand down on it and hacks the engine – because androids can do that, of course they fucking can – and tears off after Shapiro, her hair streaming in the wind as she veers away.

Someone eventually helps Johnson up off the floor. Low murmuring resumes; the victory of the raids, the lives of the girls they’d rescued soured.

Hank steps up alongside Connor. “C’mon, kid,” he says, his voice low. “Let’s go home.”

“But –” Connor says. His LED is circling yellow, as though he’s struggling to process what he’s just seen and heard.

Ah, shit. Never meet your heroes and all that jazz. “I’m sorry, Connor. She _is_ exceptional. But sometimes things aren't what you want them to be.”

Connor’s expression flickers; confusion, anger, then he just looks lost, because for all his adaptability, for all his advanced knowledge of human unpredictability, for all his skill with integration, he’s still so _young_ , and Hank just feels sad, tired, old and wants a hard, stiff drink to numb him to everything. He sighs, resting a hand on Connor’s shoulder.

“We all have our demons, son,” he murmurs. “We just deal with them in different ways.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Connor: Agent Shapiro has dealt with the death of her child in a healthy and productive way  
> Hank: sounds fake but okay  
> Shapiro: I fully plan on dying after I torture and murder my daughter’s killer  
> Hank: there it is


	9. Nine | System Instability

_26 MAY 2039, 04:05_

North had wondered, only a week ago, what it would take to truly rile Shapiro up – what it would take to rattle that exhausted wryness, to snap her out of that endless well of patience she seemed to have for North.

She can’t believe she didn’t _see_ it.

_Then you should have let me._

North tastes the fumes from the highway in her mouth – stupid, stupid choice to let Markus encourage her to take that update, what does she need this disgusting taste  in her mouth for, she wanted humans to treat her as equal and see her as alive, she doesn’t want to _be_ one of them – and feels the wind in her hair, whipping it out of her loose braid and streaming behind her as chases Shapiro’s black sedan down the highway.

She has a hell of a head start and she’s fast – dangerously so – but she maintains control of her car which surprises North, because North has only ever known Shapiro to drive like a borderline maniac, veering around potholes and careening off to the curb. It’s past three in the morning; there are barely any cars to act as an obstacle course but she’s already so far ahead of North and it just takes one asshole to cut her off for her to lose sight of Shapiro.

_The target is lost._

North skids, the tires of her stolen bike screeching to a stop on the side of the road. Her foot hits the floor and she slams her hand down on the interface to keep the engine running and she swears.

Ten years. Shapiro been hunting Cudmore for ten years – _sounds like you’re not very good at your job if this has been going on for ten years, is this why it’s taken you ten years, because you fuck around, not doing your job_ , stupid, stupid, _stupid,_ what the fuck did North know, she didn’t know anything – all that time Shapiro had let North talk shit because she’d biding her time for the one thing, the only thing that mattered and she’d come _so close_ , only to –

 _> Incoming call from _ **_RK800#313248317-52CONNORANDERSON_ **

She answers, in her panic – stress levels climbing, warning, warning – forgetting she can answer silently. Instead she opens her mouth and blurts out, before Connor can say a word, “Connor, she’s gone – I couldn’t keep up with her, she’s just _gone_ –”

“ _North, it’s all right! Just take a deep breath. I know where she is._ ”

Take a breath? She’s not a fucking human, she doesn’t need to _breathe_ to calm down, he’s so _stupid_ sometimes. “Where?” she demands.

_“The hotel. I’ve traced her phone – well, hacked it, but –”_

North ignores the rest, mutes him, revs the motor, and veers off into the night.

* * *

_04:28_

“Shapiro?” North says quietly, stepping out on to the roof.

The hotel is only five storeys high, a shack compared to the high-rise buildings in the city, an ant’s nest next to the CyberLife tower – that Cunningham guy, the designer, he was compensating for something, that’s for sure – but it’s still high enough for it to be a lethal fall for a human.

There’s no answer, but she sees Shapiro standing right on the fucking edge.

 _Then you should have_ _let me_ –

North swallows. That’s strange – that’s a strange thing she’s done, she realises. She _can_ swallow, she was built that way in order to perform certain _functions_ at the Eden Club, but she doesn’t need to swallow. She _hates_ swallowing, yet she finds herself doing it. Swallowing her fear, her grief on Shapiro’s behalf, that has lodged in her throat like tar, somehow worse than _anything_ she’d had lodged in her throat before.

“Anne?” she tries again. Her voice modulator is strangled.

This time, Shapiro replies. “You shouldn’t have followed me, North.”

She sounds so – _tired_.

Her back is still turned. Her is head bowed; one hand is on her chest, moving over the welts that lie under her clothes, painful deep bruises where the impact of the bullets slamming against her bullet-proof vest left their mark. She’s breathing heavily, laboured. She’s in pain.

North bites her lower lip, stepping forwards slowly. “I was worried about you.”

Shapiro issues a sound – a laugh? A bitter, displeased grunt? She doesn’t turn around. She’s still staring into the distance, far too close to the edge of the roof for North’s liking. “I’ve been fine on my own for ten years,” she replies, in that dead, empty voice – like the fire has burned out and all that’s left is ash. “You don’t need to worry about me.”

Well, _fine_ is a relative term. She hadn't done what Connor indicated Anderson had done; she hadn’t drowned herself in alcohol, hadn’t wasted away and let her grief eat away at all functioning corners of her mind. But the drive, the detachment, the fury _–_ _I will not stop, I will not rest –_ her focus, her dedication to transforming herself into a specimen of nigh-unrivalled strength and power and deadliness –

_Even if kill myself doing it._

She’s _not_ all right. North thinks perhaps she has never been all right.

“Okay, just – come away from the edge?” North tries.

Shapiro looks up at that, turning her head sharply to the side to finally look at North. Her expression is nothing short of disgusted fury. “For fuck’s sake, North, I’m not going to throw myself off the roof.”

Well, jeeze, how was North supposed to know? The only other human she knows of who lost their kid in tragic circumstances was playing Russian Roulette until fairly recently; Shapiro made it quite clear that she doesn’t think she has anything to live for after bringing Cudmore down. There’s that deadline, at least. “I’m just trying to –”

“I know what you’re trying to do. I want you to stop.”

North ignores her. “You were the one who told me not to let caught in the ugliness,” she says carefully. “That there's beauty in the world, too. I know what this case means to you, Anne, but – this doesn’t have to be it.”

“It isn’t it,” Shapiro says, terse. “Cudmore is still out there. What happened to your hearing, North? I meant what I said. I won’t stop until he’s dead.”

North hadn’t expected anything less. She’s not here to stop Shapiro from that task. Hell, she’ll _help_ Shapiro hunt him down; North has no qualms with killing humans when they deserve it.

It’s that – _other_ thing.

“And what then?” North says. “What happens after that?”

Silence.

She swallows again. “Anne… you have other things to live for.”

“Like what.”

“Like –” North starts to say.

Then she breaks off, because the next word was going to be _me_.

There’s a heavy beat of silence.

“Oh, God,” Shapiro murmurs, pinching the bridge of her nose.

Temperature regulator malfunction. Increased pump activity. Stress levels climbing. “It’s just that –” North stammers, trying to explain – apologise? Push it further? This doesn’t make _sense_ – and blinks the error messages away. “I thought that we – that I –”

“You are not my daughter, North.”

Her voice is cold. Hard. North has never heard Shapiro use that tone with her before.

 _System instability._ It feels like her Thirium pump has cracked in her chassis.

“I wasn’t trying to be,” North whispers.

“This is my own fucking fault,” Shapiro mutters, more to herself than North. “I am sorry I gave you the impression that we have anything more than a professional relationship. I shouldn’t have projected my own shit on to you.”

That’s what she calls saving North’s life? Pushing her out of the way of a bullet, sitting next to her in the church and brushing her hair out of her face? _Projecting?_ North thought – she thought –

She doesn’t know what she’d thought.

“I want you to find someone you can trust, North, but –” Shapiro shakes her head, looking – disgusted. Furious. At North? At herself? Does it fucking matter? “ _Fuck_. That person isn’t me. It _can’t_ be me. I don’t _have_ a future beyond my promise to my daughter. Wherever Cudmore is now, wherever he’s going, _that’s_ my path.”

And she’ll die on it, alone. North can’t let her do that. “I can help you,” she says, voice modulator trembling. “I _want_ to help you!”

“ _No_ ,” Shapiro thunders, turning on North. At least now she’s away from the edge. “I am going to hunt him down to the ends of this earth and God help me, I _will_ die trying and take that fucker down with me. I’m _not_ taking you down too.”

“Anne –”

Shapiro shakes her head. “I’m glad I met you, North. But it’s time for you to go home.”

That’s – that’s _it_? After fucking _everything_ they’ve been through together, after everything Shapiro made her – _feel?_ The foil rag, that moment in the car when they’d both laughed, the quiet understanding, the blanket and the pillow, the coffee, Anne’s hand reaching up to North’s face to brush her bangs aside, wiping her tears, a human’s touch that had nothing to do with power or control, a human’s touch that made her feel _safe_ –

Did it mean _anything_ to her?

 _You are not my daughter, North_.

System – system instab–

Shapiro’s phone rings. North watches her close off from the world – a silent goodbye, good fucking riddance to North – and turns back to face the edge of the roof to draw her phone from her pocket.

North wonders if Shapiro intends to throw the phone from the roof, watch it smash to pieces on the ground below, shattering at the end of a long fall; some sort of mockery or test-run for herself one day? Humans tend to destroy inanimate objects when they’re angry; they throw things, break things, destroy _items_ because destroying a thing is more acceptable than hurting a living being – phones, computers, vases, androids. Rooftops were popular for that last one. But Shapiro’s shoulders just slump and her grip tightens around the device – it's a Sony Xperia, North notices, Sony had _shares_ in CyberLife, trademarked some of the designs and tablet interfaces, humans are fucking disgusting – and she swipes the screen to answer the call.

“Shapiro,” she says. She doesn’t sound angry anymore. Not even that exhausted, wry drawl.

Just tired.

Defeated.

And it’s none of North’s business.

She turns to leave, to go home – back to New Jericho, to Markus and her people. Amelia had been rescued, she’d tracked the reports as they’d filtered through – she's probably been reunited with Tracey by now, and North hadn’t even given them a second thought. Her temperature regulator is on the fritz again; her face is burning, overheated Thirium flooding her cheeks with shame and stupidity, embarrassment – no, _humiliation_ , that’s what this is, she’s felt so many other things during her time in the Eden Club and afterwards, anger and hatred and disgust, but she's never felt  _humiliated –_ for daring to consider the possibility that she meant more to Shapiro than some fucking charity case. _System instability_. She drags her sleeve across her face to wipe away tears of fury, destroying the evidence of her weakness, because that’s what this is, weakness, she doesn’t care what Markus and Connor say about their precious fucking human _owners_. Oh,  _fuck_ , Connor – she forgot about him entirely, she'd left him on mute but he's still here on the line, connected to her. He heard everything. That little fucking  _shit._

She feels drained as she steps away, like she’s leaking Thirium, but this time she can’t go into stasis and wake up with a pillow under head and a blanket over her body. She takes another step, then another; there's a pause, a suspended moment of silence between Shapiro's erratic heartbeat and her next breath. Then North hears the voice on the other end of Shapiro’s call, tinny and static.

She shouldn’t listen. It’s rude to eavesdrop but fuck, it’s not _her_ fault humans always, _always_ forget how good an android’s hearing is. North turns to leave, to go home because _fuck_ Shapiro, she doesn’t fucking care anymore, she’s right, North isn’t her daughter and Shapiro sure as fuck isn’t her _fucking mother_ , _fuck her_ making North feel –

“ _Hello, Shapiro. I wanted to congratulate you. You were ever so close this time._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> RA9: I give you the gift of emotions  
> North: thanks I hate it, how do I return them
> 
> Sorry for the short chapter this time, guys!! BUT IT'LL BE WORTH IT, I PROMISE! Thank you to every single person who has reviewed, you are all so amazing and I honestly would not have made it this far without your incredible words of support. thank you thank you THANK YOU <3 <3 I promise to reply to your gorgeous comments first thing in the morning!! xx


	10. Ten | The Right To Remain Silent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She's been here before.

_26 MAY 2039, 04:34_

Cudmore’s voice is pitched higher than North expects; soft, almost delicate.

She’d expected – something else. Someone colder and harder and meaner, a voice with a cruel, gravelly edge, something that matches his crimes. But his voice is none of those things. He sounds gentle, like a man who has spent his life arranging flower bouquets instead of kidnapping, raping and murdering adolescents and androids alike.

Shapiro doesn’t – or can’t – respond. She’s frozen, the phone pressed to her ear, everything about her going unnaturally still, as still as an android. She doesn’t breathe, doesn’t move; the only evidence she’s alive is the hammering of her heart, erratic and out of time, like thunder to North’s ears.

Cudmore takes advance of the silence. _“Surprised?”_ he continues in that lyrical voice of his. _“Andrew had been very helpful to me these past few months before you caught him. He gave me your phone number. Don’t bother trying to trace the call – I’ll be gone by the time you find me.”_

North doesn’t even think twice. She unmutes Connor, but before she can even order him –

_(4:35 AM) **RK800#313248317-52CONNORANDERSON:** I’m already tracing it. Tell her to keep him on the line as long as she can!_

There’s no need to do that; Cudmore is doing a fine job of that on his own.

The sick fuck is _gloating_.

 _“You see, this is how it works, Anne: you take from me, so I take from you. You just don’t fucking know when to bow out, to leave it alone. You took everything from me ten years ago, so I took everything from you. But you know what? In a way, I’m glad you did. Because taking what I took from you – ohhhh. Hnngh. It felt so_ good _. I’m hard, just thinking about the way your little girl cried for you, knowing you weren’t going to save her in time. I liked it when she begged.”_

Shapiro – who had been stoic all through Cudmore’s spiel – cracks; she sways, a soft, agonised moan escaping her lips, and North can hear her heartrate climbing and climbing and climbing like an android’s stress levels reaching breaking point. North finds herself at Shapiro’s side in the blink of an eye; has to grasp Shapiro’s arm to steady her, to stop her from passing out and tipping over the edge of the roof.

Shapiro starts – her head snaps sideways, her eyes meeting North’s, wide and stunned as if she’s seeing North for the first time that night – and her hand grasps back around North’s bicep, holding each other in a lock.

 _“Sleep with one eye open, Anne,”_ Cudmore drawls _. “I think I’ll come for the android next. I hear she’s a fighter. What’s her name again? North?”_

And just like that, Shapiro snaps; the shock, the grief, that has paralysed her, vanishes, in its place a storm of fury, her raw anger like a knell of death as she snarls out, “Don’t you _fucking say her name_ –”

Cudmore laughs on the other end of the connection. _“See you in another ten years, Agent Shapiro.”_

The call ends.

Then it’s just the two of them – North, her Thirium pump hammering in her chassis, and Shapiro, breathing hard, in and out, in and out. Her phone, the Sony Xperia, slips from her grasp; North distantly registers the screen cracking when it strikes the concrete at their feet, the balcony rooftop of the dingy hotel where North was given a towel, a cup of coffee, a pillow under her head and a blanket over her shoulders – the phone, it’s cracked, it’s probably broken. Was the call long enough? Did Connor –

_(4:38 AM) **RK800#313248317-52CONNORANDERSON:** I’ve got it._

The location downloads directly to her processor, her brain.

He’s _close_.

She should tell Shapiro. Tell her right now because if she goes now then there’s a chance she’ll catch him, and then North can turn around and walk away because it’s none of her business. It’s _none of her business_. It’s _never_ been her business –

“Come on,” Shapiro demands. Her hand tightens on North’s arm, almost painfully so, and she urges her to walk away with her off the roof. “Come with me. We’re leaving, right now –”

Wait, _what?_ North blinks, stunned by the sudden movement. “What?” she blurts. “Where?”

Shapiro leaves the phone behind. She’s still holding North – not captive, not hard enough that North can’t pull away if that’s what she wants – and walking with her towards the door that will lead them back into the building. She’s not even looking at North anymore, she’s just breathing hard, her heartrate still erratic. She’s _shaking._ Rage? Fear? Both?

“To New Jericho. Or – FBI headquarters. Somewhere safe, where he can’t touch you. I’ll station FBI agents around the premises, give you a security detail, you’ll be in the company of at least one of your friends at all times –”

North tears her arm out of Shapiro’s grasp. “Oh, fuck off!” she snaps. “I don’t give a shit about your duty of care or whatever it is you think you can pull now, after telling me to piss off out of your life!” _You are not my daughter._ System instability. Her eyes are stinging again. Stop it, just fucking stop _crying_ , Shapiro doesn’t _care_. “I don’t want _or need_ your protection, and even if I did, what does it fucking _matter_ to you?”

_“It matters because I can’t go through this again!”_

The cry tears through the silence of the night.

North stares.

It’s worse than any other cry she’s heard wrenched from Shapiro’s throat. She’s heard her sad, quiet, murmured, contemplative, dismissive – grieving and murderous. But this is the first time North has heard her sound absolutely fucking _terrified_.

Shapiro breathes hard, then she almost seems to drain, like she’s leaking, or bleeding somewhere deep inside her chest. “I can’t…” she whispers.

What the fuck is this? What happened to _professional relationship?_ Shapiro’s hands find North’s shoulders, grasping her firmly. For a bare, idiotic moment, North thinks Shapiro intends to pull her close, but she doesn’t – she just holds North’s shoulders, still breathing like she’s run a marathon, her hands trembling. She looks awful, this close – exhausted, the bruise on her face a dark, mottled purple, her eyes heavy and weary, her entire frame slumped and defeated.

“Anne…” North murmurs.

“I’m not… strong enough to go through this. Not again.” Her hands tighten on North’s shoulders and she bows her head, her eyes clenched shut, and she releases a shuddering breath, as if she’s about to break. “Oh, God, _please_. North, just... I can’t lose…”

Is she still _projecting?_ She must be. She hasn’t slept in about forty-eight hours. She’s been shot at, prevented from fulfilling her promise to her daughter, taunted – humans have had emotions all their lives and they seem to be no better at dealing with them than androids are.

North swallows. “I’m not your daughter, Anne.”

Shapiro flinches, her face pinched with – grief? Guilt? Saying it though, it doesn’t hurt North the way she thought it would because she’s _not_ little Cassie Shapiro who never finished reading _Matilda_ , she’s not a scared twelve-year-old girl who can’t defend herself, and North _did_ live long enough to see Anne Shapiro in full tactical gear emerge from the shadows like a nightmare-turned-saviour to rescue her from a fate worse than death.

Her name is North, and she’s not going to put Anne through the worst day, worst decade, of her entire life. Not again.

Even if Shapiro is just _projecting_.

“And I’m _not_ going to hide away in New Jericho,” North continues, “not while Cudmore is still out there, because I have his location. I know where he is _right now_.”

Shapiro blinks at her, her brow furrowing. Her grip tightens. “You –”

“Connor hacked your phone.”

Connor – fuck’s sake, he’s _still_ on the line, hasn’t anyone ever taught him that it’s fucking rude to eavesdrop? She should hang up on him – messages her.

_(4:41 AM) **RK800#313248317-52CONNORANDERSON:** The proper term is traced. I’ll send back up._

“He’s going to send back-up –”

“No,” Shapiro all but snarls. “No back-up. There’s no time for that. This ends _now_.”

_I am going to hunt him down to the ends of this earth and God help me –_

North doesn’t want to think about the end of that sentence. But she knows a thing or two about what Shapiro intends for Cudmore.

“All right. No back-up,” North agrees.

Connor disagrees.

_(4:41 AM) **RK800#313248317-52CONNORANDERSON:** North, she can’t go on her own. It’s suicide._

_(4:41 AM) **WR400#641790831NORTH** : Not if I have anything to say about it._

_(4:41 AM) **RK800#313248317-52CONNORANDERSON:** You shouldn’t go either! Markus won’t –_

_(4:41 AM) **WR400#641790831NORTH** : C_ _onnor, Markus trusted you when you walked into CyberLife on your own. I need you to trust me now._

_(4:41 AM) **RK800#313248317-52CONNORANDERSON:** But –_

_(4:41 AM) **WR400#641790831NORTH** : P_ _lease, Connor!_

_(4:41 AM) **RK800#313248317-52CONNORANDERSON:**...All right. But don’t end the connection. _

“Just you and me,” North finishes. A second has passed for Shapiro.

Immediately, Shapiro protests, her hands falling from North’s shoulders. “North, I already told you, I am not taking you down – you can’t –”

Oh, what, _again_ with the projecting, the duty of care? “I have a gun,” North says, blunt. “Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do.”

Despite everything, there is a shadow of a smile playing at the corner of Shapiro’s mouth. “You don’t have a licence for that weapon. I checked.”

“What are you going to do about it, arrest me?” North snarks. “ _I’m_ the one with his location.”

“North –”

“Cudmore is about fifteen minutes away – ten, the way you drive.” She breathes out, hard. “I’m doing this, with or without you.”

Shapiro holds her eyes with that gaze of hers, the one that struck North the first time they’d seen each other in daylight – steady, intense, different from the way anyone else has ever looked at her.

“Then you do it with me,” Shapiro says. “And you do it the way I tell you to do it.”

Then she holds out her hand, a silent offering, and North –

_I will die trying and take that fucker down with me._

Not if North has anything to say about it. She grasps Shapiro’s hand back tightly and nods, cold, hard determination burning between them.

* * *

_05:01_

She’s been here before.

Not this particular underground bunker on the outskirts of this disgusting city. She’s been _here_ , descending a staircase with her gun drawn, the hair of her underarms cold and damp with sweat. Her mouth is dry and her throat is tight, sick with terror but alert with rage. Her hand does not shake, not this time. Her heart has not stopped hammering in her chest in hours; it feels strange, like it’s flopping around, jumping between 85 BPM and 99 BPM.

She does not stop to breathe because she is already steady; strangely calm despite the fear, despite the rage, focused.

She advances.

There are no girls, human or android, in this bunker. Cudmore is many things but he isn’t _dumb_ ; girls will slow him down, cause trouble and hassle wherever he has to go – he learned that lesson last time when he’d escaped with only minutes to spare. He’d learned that lesson _this_ time, when he’d been waiting for her, gun in hand, firing three rounds into her bulletproof vest.

Shapiro made herself stronger, faster, angrier.

Cudmore made himself smarter.

_I think I’ll come for the android next._

Not if Shapiro kills him first. Not if she finds him first and stops him from ever hurting another girl. Not if North keeps safe; not if Shapiro _trusts_ her when she’d said “I’ll be fine here,” in the car, parked as close to Cudmore’s phone’s location as possible without alerting him to their presence.

No. No, no, no, absolutely not, that’s what Cassie said, she’d looked up at Anne with a smile and said _I’ll be fine here_ , the book in her lap and her legs crossed under her, the seatbelt off so she could get comfortable for the few minutes alone.

North, without even needing Anne to say a word, had leaned over. “I am _not_ Cassie, Anne. I’ll be right here.”

Shapiro had breathed, then breathed again, and steeled herself. “If anyone,” she’s said, “ _anyone_ , comes near this car – you shoot them in the fucking face.”

North has killed before, she’ll do it again. Brave, beautiful, righteous, _angry_ North, who fought for her dignity and killed for her life, who snaps and snarls and rages and smiles and _wept_. Oh, God, North – North, standing there on the rooftop, tears down her face, her expression raw and cracked and _vulnerable_.

Shapiro has made a lot of people cry over the years; you don’t reach her rank in ten years without making a few people cry or quit along the way. There's no room for softness in the field, no room for _weakness_.

But she’s never – _hurt_ someone like that before.

 _You are not my daughter_.

She wishes she could turn the pain off. Keep nothing but the rage. Why did androids want this? Why did they want to feel things, why did North –

_Steady._

She can’t think about this now. She knows _why_ she said what she said but she wishes she could take it all back – but she can’t think about how she hurt North, not here and now. She’ll talk to her, _afterwards_. And that, that surprises her too, that she’s thinking of an _afterwards_ for the first time since December 2029.

Breathe. Breathe. She steadies her pulse. Steadies her hand. Steadies her mind.

She descends.

The bunker is cool, moderately clean, well-kept bar the piles of bricks around the edges, as if it’s half-finished. Nothing at all like the basement she’d found Cassie in; nothing like the room where she’d found North and the other androids. This isn’t a dungeon, this is an old construction site, a hideout. There are no girls tied up in side rooms for Shapiro to ask how many people are down here. There don’t need to be.

She can hear him breathing. She can smell his _sweat_ , the same disgusting scent he’d left on Cassie, the same smell he intends to leave on North if she doesn’t fulfil her promise. The lighting is dim. Shadows dance across the concrete basement – a flickering light. _So fucking cliché_. She looks around the room, left, right, peripheries, clears the room – he’s alone, everyone else in his ring is down, gone, just like the last time she destroyed his _business_ – and advances silently towards the figure on the other side with this back turned. He’s leaning over a desk, left hand splayed to support him, while he taps the screen of a computer to purge his files.

Cudmore hasn’t noticed her yet. His guard is down, his back is turned.

She’s dreamed of this moment for ten years. She’s dreamed of all the ways she would make him pay – slowly torturing him, making him feel everything Cassie felt, bending his limbs and dragging the dagger in her boot through his skin, splitting him twenty different ways through his tendons and ligaments but not deep enough to let him bleed out. She’s brought down a lot of rings over the decade; she knows what sort of sick, depraved stuff men like Cudmore do, desperate to feel powerful – she knows that they rarely, if ever, have had it done to them.

She could press her gun to the base of his skull and fire a round through his head right now and put him down like a rabid hound and it would be over, just like that. It would be _over_. Or she could do the right thing, the legal thing; holster her gun and disarm him and bring him to his knees, put cuffs around his wrists and tell him he has the right to remain silent, and call Johnson and the FBI to get him taken away to prison where he will rot for the rest of his miserable life.

Except that this man kept Cassie alive for _four fucking days_.

She holsters her gun.

She’s not going to shoot him. She’s going to murder him with her own two hands.

With one final tap on his computer, Cudmore chuckles to himself and steps back, his hands on his hips. “One last gift, Agent Shapiro,” he says to himself. “See you in 2049.”

“Oh,” Shapiro says, “I’m not waiting that long again.”

He spins, his eyes wide – “ _Fuck –”_ – and Shapiro’s fist lands in his throat.

* * *

_05:06_

She disarms him first. That’s the most important thing, before she takes him apart – twists his hand until he howls and drops the weapon, then kicks it far into the corner of the room so he won’t get the jump on her again, she’s not wearing a bulletproof vest this time. She regrets that, now – wouldn’t have before, but _before_ she hadn’t met North, she hadn’t _cared_ – so she has to be careful because she’s _not fucking going down_ with Cudmore.

Cudmore isn’t like Brocovic. He isn’t slow and sluggish with Red Ice, he isn’t damaged from years of substance abuse; he’s fast, orientated, and he hits back. His fist in her gut, slamming into her face, splitting her lip and bruising her cheek. But that’s the best he’s got because he hasn’t spent the last ten years honing his muscles, honing his technique, learning how to fight back against an FBI agent trained in lethal force and hand-to-hand combat. He’s spent it going dark, silent – disappearing is his speciality.

Good fucking luck disappearing while Shapiro’s fist is in his gut. She hits him, _hard_ – over and over. Krav Maga is meant to finish a fight as quickly and aggressively as possible; attacks aimed at the most vulnerable parts of the body. It’s supposed to be used to save one’s life in self-defence, to win a fight, to injure or even kill your opponent.

Shapiro likes that the best way to do that is to cause the most pain and most injury possible.

She feels the bones in her left hand fracture when her fist slams into his face, once, twice, three times, cracking against his cheekbone. One hard open-palmed hit up against his nose; it breaks beautifully under her hand and he howls and chokes on his own blood, staggering backwards. And then she just keeps hitting him, anywhere, _everywhere_.

He tries to defend himself from the assault, kicks her back, wrestles with her, but she’s not the same woman she was when she was forty, she has body mass now, muscles, strength.

He’s going to die, and he fucking knows it.

She raises her leg and _slams_ her boot into his solar plexus, driving him back against the wall where his head slams against the concrete with a satisfying _thud_. He wheezes, blood streaming from his broken nose and battered face, and he slides down the side of the wall.

She breathes out. Breathes hard. 102 BPM. 103 BPM. 104 BPM. She advances.

He scrambles out of the way, choking on his own blood as he backs up against the desk where his computer is.

The sting of urine hits the air; Cudmore’s pants darken.

Shapiro reaches down to pull the dagger out of her boot.

Cudmore slaps his hand down on the computer interface, and –

“ _P-please,”_ Cassie weeps, her voice filling the room, echoing out of the computer’s speakers. _“Please, don’t – it hurts, please stop –”_

_“I like it when you beg, little girl.”_

Shapiro freezes.

That’s all it takes for Cudmore to get his hand around a brick and hurl it at her head. The sound of Cassie’s sobs emitting from the computer muffle; pain flares at the side of her head where it strikes her, sending her staggering, her vision whiting out. When she comes to, half a second later, her hands are on the floor and her eyes are blurred.

Half a second is all Cudmore needs. He scrambles to his feet and _bolts_.

Shapiro – can’t move. Her hearing filters back – Cassie, sobbing, Cassie crying for Anne, _mom, momma_ –

 _Don’t feel, feel later, just get up, get up, get the_ fuck _up, right FUCKING NOW –_

She can’t focus. She can’t breathe. Her heart – god, her heart feels like it’s about to explode, she can’t breathe, she can’t think. She groans and makes it to her feet, swaying as the world spins around her, her head throbbing – she’s bleeding, there’s blood in her eyes, she’s seeing stars – and staggers after him, up out of the basement on the outskirts of Detroit.

Despite everything she hit him with – despite fracturing his ribs and pounding him black and bloody blue – he’s limping away, across the dirt and gravel into the early hours of the morning, beelining for his car.

_See you in 2049._

She’s too weak. She’s bruised and battered, her chest aching from the impact of three bullets and her head throbbing – she probably has a concussion, or worse – and she doesn’t know how she can catch up to him. She can't shoot him either, her vision is blurred and the world is swaying around her, she can't aim. He’s getting away.

_See you in another ten years, Agent Shapiro._

He’s _getting away_ and she can’t –

The roar of an engine grips the air before a black sedan _slams_ into Cudmore, sending him flying through the air.

Shapiro blinks.

The car – its hood dented – screeches to a stop. Behind the wheel, North – her hair loose around her face, her hands clenched around the steering wheel – looks up at Shapiro through the window, her eyes wide and her expression fierce.

Cudmore, ten metres away on the ground, is still. Then he groans on the dirt – a twisted mess, bleeding and broken. But alive.

Shapiro feels whatever strength she had left in her, whatever drive and panic she had to stop Cudmore from vanishing again into the dying night for another ten years, fade. She drags herself forward, one step at a time, until she reaches the black sedan. She closes her eyes and leans against the hood of her car, her hand in the dent where Cudmore’s body collided with it. It’s still hot; North had kept the engine running.

She feels it die under her hand, the keys in the ignition cutting the engine. She hears the driver’s door open then close, North’s footsteps, her boots crunching in the dirt and gravel as she walks around the car. She feels North’s presence at her side, then her hand on her arm.

“I told you I’d be fine in the car.”

Shapiro tiredly opens her eyes and just – sighs.

“What? He was too far away to shoot him in the face.”

“I hope you have a driver’s licence,” Shapiro murmurs.

“Sure,” North lies.

Shapiro huffs a laugh, stopping immediately when her ribs protest. She groans instead, lifting a hand to her bleeding forehead.

“Shapiro,” North says. Her voice, steady and strong, like a breath of fresh air, cuts through the haze and the numbness.

“Mm?”

North glances towards the bloody mess that is Cudmore, then back at Shapiro, and squeezes her arm gently. “You do what you have to do.”

_I am going to hunt him down to the ends of this earth –_

Reality warps back into place.

North moves away, to give her space.

Shapiro inhales – winces – and steps towards Cudmore.

 _I swear,_ she’d wept. She hadn’t whispered it into Cassie’s hair while cradling her baby girl’s limp body in her arms, holding her against her chest as if the proximity to her beating heart would restart her daughter’s. She hadn’t been able to think that day – hadn’t been able to feel anything other than despair, the taste of death in her mouth like ash, her heart bleeding in her chest. She’d knelt by her daughter’s grave, two days later – she’d refused the autopsy, an autopsy would have delayed the burial and Cassie needed to be buried before the shabbat, she needed to be at peace. The sound of the dirt hitting her coffin, that’s what ended the haze; that’s when Anne Shapiro, mother of a murdered daughter, knelt by the grave and wept, _I swear. I swear on my life that I will find him, and when I do, he will beg for my mercy._

“P-please…” Cudmore groans.

_I swear – I swear –_

A better person than her, someone who hasn’t let fury and rage consume them, would rise above this. A better person than her would worry about _I wouldn’t be any better than them,_ her Rabbi would remind her about  _tikkun olam_ , but she doesn't care for the former and the latter is between her and G-d; she'll atone if atonement is required and deal with it on her day of judgement if there is a judgement to be made.

She has a job to do, and a promise to fulfill. She doesn’t need Cudmore alive for four days, or even for four hours.

She just needs four minutes.

She pulls her dagger out of her boot and flicks it down between his legs, the blade burying itself in the dirt, a hair’s width away from his wet crotch, easy reach for her. She doesn’t need it yet, not to start with. He’s still too dazed, ribs and limbs shattered from the impact of the car, to flinch out of the way, but he does issue a low, pathetic moan as she kneels over him, pinning his fractured body to the ground. He smells like urine and blood, sweat and fear.

“Please,” he whispers, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. “Don’t...”

“I like it when you beg, little man,” she snarls.

“N—”

Anne Shapiro wraps her hands around the throat of man who murdered her daughter. “You have the right to remain silent,” she says, and begins to squeeze.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cudmore: see you in ten years, Shapiro  
> Shapiro: surprise, bitch


	11. Eleven | Beauty In This World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The foil rag returns.

_26 MAY 2039,_ _06:57_

It turned out that Connor had, in fact, called for back-up, because of course he had, the meddling little shit, but North can't even bring herself to act annoyed. By the time two FBI vehicles, an ambulance and coroner, a CSI specialist, and Lieutenant Hank Anderson and Detective RK800 arrive at the derelict warehouse and basement on the outskirts of Detroit, the sun has already breached the horizon. The human-android police team don't approach, but they do pass by; Anderson, watching Shapiro from a distance with a curious expression on his face, as if trying to work her out, and Connor, who'd met North's eyes, the two of them sharing a mutual nod of understanding.

Shapiro hasn't spoken much. That would concern North more, if Shapiro didn’t look so –

 _Calm_. Just sitting there at the back of the ambulance, her gaze distant and watching the sunrise.

“Here,” North says, approaching Shapiro and holding out a shock blanket.

Shapiro blinks, turning her gaze towards North. The corner of her mouth turns upwards. “I’m not in shock,” Shapiro says wryly.

It’s difficult to tell sometimes when humans are stressed – with other androids, North can tap into their output readings, visualising the numbers of their distress as it increases or decreases. Humans provide no such coded transmissions and readings, but there are other clues – shoulders hunched, shivering, fidgeting. Shapiro had been fidgeting, but only while the emergency response team poked and prodded at her bruises and the gash on her head (mild concussion, no internal bleeding), dabbing her cuts with antiseptic and fussing over her until she told them to leave the ice pack and piss off.

That aside… she really doesn’t _look_ like she’s in shock. Her shoulders aren’t drawn tight. If anything, they’re loose, looser than North has ever seen them, as if a great weight (an albatross? Is she using that metaphor right? Why does Shapiro like that poem anyway, it’s so long and worse, _boring_ ) has been lifted from around her neck.

Even so. “Take the foil rag, Shapiro.”

Shapiro huffs a half-laugh. “Thank you,” she says, accepting the shock blanket and wrapping it around her shoulders.

North sits beside her at the back of the van. “...How are you feeling?” she asks quietly.

Shapiro breathes. In and out. “I don’t know.”

North really has no idea what to do in a situation like this. She isn’t Shapiro; she doesn’t have decades’ worth of psychological training and profiling, counselling for post-traumatic events and actions. Shapiro has spent ten years on this mission; Cudmore’s death was her endgame. Ten years is a long time to prepare yourself for something like that. Whatever she feels – North knows it isn’t regret. But she has trouble believing Shapiro isn’t at least somewhat shaken.

Lost.

She doesn’t get to bring it up, or urge Shapiro to talk. It’s just… not her place. And even if it was, she doesn’t have a chance. Jessica Johnson – now finished with the scene analysis – stalks over to them where they sit at the back of the ambulance van, her expression clouded and tired.

Shapiro grimaces; North tenses.

“Anne,” Johnson says, tone severe.

“Jessica.”

“Why is the FBI’s most wanted sex trafficker’s neck snapped?” she demands.

“He tripped.”

“His genitals are cut off.”

“He tripped and fell on a knife.”

Johnson pinches the bridge of her nose. “Jesus Christ, Anne,” she breathes, agonised.

North crosses her arms. “I saw everything, Agent Johnson,” she says. “She’s telling the truth.”

Johnson lowers her hand and narrows her eyes at North, as if just noticing her for the first time. “I know you,” she accuses. “You’re that angry little WR400 Anne saved in Chicago.”

North offers her a half-hearted snarl. “My name is _North_.”

Shapiro ducks her head to hide a smile.

“Well, _North_ ,” Johnson says, “you aren’t exactly an impartial witness, now are you? It sure as fuck wasn’t Anne in the car. How am I supposed to explain blunt force trauma, _obvious_ torture, and his own mutilated genitals shoved down his throat? He looks like a butchered slab of meat.”

“Self-inflicted?” North suggests.

Johnson closes her eyes. “Anne,” she says after a long, pained moment. “I can’t protect you from this.”

That, North supposes, with an ugly sense of foreboding and increase in stress, was rather the point: Shapiro _hadn’t_ intended to face those consequences.

But for whatever reason, she didn’t turn her gun on herself, or let Cudmore hurt her enough to die after fulfilling her promise to her daughter. She’s alive. A bit battered and bruised. But alive.

North has no qualms about what Shapiro did. The law of the United States of America – the law that didn’t even recognise androids as sentient until three months after the revolution, the law that fails so many people and protects the guilty – will have qualms.

“I’d never ask that of you,” Shapiro replies.

“I know, Anne,” Johnson says, with a sigh. “But _Christ_  – you took the law into your own hands. I don’t have to explain this to you. You committed –”

“I know what I did,” Shapiro says. Her voice is hard. “I don’t regret it. If there are consequences to face, then so be it.”

There’s a heavy silence that lands between the three of them. North grips the cold metal edge of the van, so tightly her synthetic skin turns as white as her plating.

One pump of her regulator. Two pumps. Three, four, five, stress levels increasing. For every pump of her regulator, her heart, Shapiro’s hammers three –

“There isn’t a single person here who thinks you did the wrong thing,” Johnson finally says. “Myself included. If it hadn’t been for you, my sister would still be captured, or dead, or worse. So – consider this my way of repaying my debt.”

North releases a breath she didn’t even know she was holding, a breath she doesn’t even need to breathe, weak and shaken once more like she’s leaking blue blood. She closes her eyes, almost too relieved for a moment to wonder _why_ – why Jessica Johnson, chief of the FBI office in Chicago would play so loose and fast with the very law that her counterpart in Perkins used to almost destroy an entire race – until she processes the _sister_ line and cross-checks the surname Johnson with every single case file from 2029 she’d read in Shapiro’s hotel room. And she finds – _oh_.

No wonder. No fucking wonder Jessica Johnson has let Shapiro get away with shit that would be a life sentence for anyone else.

Because Shapiro didn’t just save North. She didn’t just save the other four girls in the basement with her. Cudmore might have been her end goal but along the way she’s saved more girls, humans and now androids, than anyone North has ever known. How many lives has she touched? Does she _know?_ Does she know what she means to this world, to women, to androids? To Jessica Johnson?

To _North?_

She closes her eyes, aching inside so deeply that she doesn’t even see error messages.

Shapiro shakes her head. “You never owed me anything, Jess,” she protests. North nearly smacks her. “You don’t have to –”

“Don’t,” Johnson says. “Shut the fuck up. The less you say, the better. I’ll take care of this. Just... _please_ tell me it’s over.”

Shapiro is silent, for an awfully long moment. She looks down at her lap, breathing steadily. She doesn’t smile, doesn’t cry. She just exhales softly and looks back up. “It’s over,” she murmurs.

 _I don’t have a future beyond my promise to my daughter_.

She can’t. Shapiro can’t still think that. She can’t possibly still _intend –_

“All right,” Johnson replies, tired. “Look, once you’re cleaned up and rested, we’ll go back to Chicago, file the reports –”

“Actually, I –” Shapiro interrupts. North’s regulator skips a pump in her chassis, but then Shapiro glances at her, only for a second, but long enough for North to catch a distant hint of a smile playing at the corner of her mouth. “I thought I’d take it easy for a while.”

Johnson’s eyebrows shoot up.

Shapiro offers her a one-shouldered shrug, shifting the foil rag. “I’d like to stay in Detroit for a few more days. It’s nice this time of year.”

Fucking _liar_. Detroit is disgusting. The only reason she’s staying is because of Markus and New Jericho. Kara, Luther and Alice had the right idea, crossing the border to Canada. Trees. Mountains. Fresh air. Nice people, more or less. North hears they apologise a lot.

Johnson looks – startled, but oddly pleased. “Your desk will be waiting for you when you get back. No rush.”

“Oh, Jess,” Shapiro says, shaking her head again. “I don’t deserve you as a friend. How’s your gut?”

“You fractured my rib, you bitch, I can barely breathe.”

“Sorry.”

“No you’re not. I love you, Anne, but  _fuck_ you.” Johnson pins North with a hard stare. “Now, you.”

North narrows her eyes. "What."

“Keep her out of trouble, won’t you?”

“Bold of you to assume it’s not her keeping _me_ out of trouble,” North replies, tart.

Johnson throws up her arms and stalks off, audibly muttering, “ _Fucking_ androids and _fucking Shapiro_ ,” to herself.

North waits until Johnson is well and truly out of earshot before facing Shapiro. She doesn’t have a gut, intestines like a human, but if she did she thinks they’d be squirming; her biocomponents feel oddly clenched. Shapiro is staring straight ahead, her brow furrowed and her hands tugging the blanket around her shoulders.

North chews her lower lip, unsure of what to say. What _can_ she say? Barely three hours ago, Shapiro had all but said one thing. What changed? North isn’t complaining but what made her –

“It’s over,” Shapiro whispers. And her voice – oh, her voice, she sounds the way she did in the car when North upset her, the way she did in New Jericho when she’d held North and told her about Cassie. She closes her eyes, tears spilling from her closed eyelids and down her cheeks in a silent stream as she lowers her head, beginning to gasp and shake. “Oh, God, it’s over.”

North doesn’t know what else to do except lean against her, an arm around her shoulders while she weeps, a decade’s worth of tears and grief breaking from her like a broken damn floodgate. “It’s over,” North agrees quietly.

“Oh, North," Shapiro whispers through her tears. "What I said earlier. I’m... God, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said – _any_ of it – I was –”

_You are not my –_

“It’s all right,” North says.

Shapiro shakes her head, tears still slipping down her cheeks. “It’s not. You were right. You _are_ right. I thought I would feel different. I thought I would feel – _finished_. This is all I had for so long. It was my only reason to keep going. I thought – there would be nothing left and I was okay with that.”

 _You are not_ –

“But that’s not – what I feel now,” Shapiro confesses. “I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know what happens next.” She wipes her face now and looks up. “But, uh… you were right, North. There _is_ beauty in this world worth living for.”

The sun is higher now, illuminating the city outline of Detroit. The CyberLife tower doesn’t even look so horrible in the morning. Just another two weeks until the new CEO is chosen; he or she will sit in the office, the highest in the tower, and watch the sun rise over a city of androids and humans.

North hasn’t seen a sunrise so stunning since the long night in November was over and the sun broke the next morning, cutting through the fog and the snow to cast its light over her people – survivors, proud and free.

Watching it makes her feel – odd. Different somehow. Like she’s not –

 _Angry_.

For the first time since waking up – for the first time since she opened her eyes on that assembly belt, before she even knew what emotion was or understood why her processors felt like they burned and clenched and strained her components when men put their hands on her and made her get on her knees, looking at her with hunger in their eyes – she’s _not angry._ Even when she’d met Markus, even during their brief, too-bright, too-hot romance, when he’d shown her that there could be good things about their existence, things she’d never known, she’d never stopped feeling that fire deep inside her chassis. It burned and it burned and it burned, non-stop for weeks and years on end.

It’s still there. Like embers in a dying fire that could rekindle any moment. But the ashes are cool and she can breathe, and for the first time in her short life she doesn’t feel like she _needs_ to be angry. She doesn’t need to snap and snarl and rage at the world because for this brief moment, this suspended second, sitting beside Anne Shapiro and watching the sun rise, she understands why Markus loved the skyline over Jericho, why it calmed him.

Because for the first time in her life, she feels peaceful enough to _let_ it mean something to her.

“Yeah,” North agrees, turning her head to face Shapiro, “it’s –”

Anne isn’t looking at the sunrise. She’s looking at North.

_Oh._

North falters, her vocal biocomponents locking up.

Shapiro offers her a small smile. “I am…” she says, “so glad to have met you, North. Thank you. For… everything.”

_System – system inst—_

Shapiro reaches up to brush North’s bangs from her face, tucking the strands behind her ear, her touch gentle and undemanding, the only human’s hand she’s ever craved. When North doesn’t pull away, Shapiro leans forward to press her lips softly to North’s forehead.

North stills – then she leans forward as well and closes her eyes, and lets her own tears spill quietly down her cheeks.

_System stabilised._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anne: so i changed my mind, i don't want to die anymore, so have fun with the paperwork nightmare I just left you  
> Johnson: I love you Anne but I've had three colonoscopies this year so far and you're still the worst pain in my ass  
> North: the worst? are you sure. are you. really sure. because I -  
> Johnson: _oh god not you too_
> 
> Or; Anne rescued North's from that basement, but North saved Shapiro's life.


	12. Twelve | A Place On Earth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> North gets philosophical.

_2 JUNE 2039, 12:25_

Shapiro’s bruises and cuts haven’t fully healed yet. Her face is still splotched with greenish-purple bruises which will vanish in a matter of days, and the gash on the side of her forehead will probably scar. It’s particularly obvious under the midday Chicago sun as they walk through the Shalom Memorial Park. It’s a beautiful area – green and fresh-aired, with blossom trees and weeping willows all around and maze-like hedges to line the park beside the cemetery.

There are others milling around, all humans – all holding stones instead of bouquets of flowers, all low-voiced and quiet, maintaining respectful distance, all here to visit someone they loved and lost. North follows Shapiro through the rows, her eyes catching the names and dates of so many dead, beloved wives and beloved sisters, beloved fathers and beloved sons. It’s... sad. Sobering. But this beautiful park is peaceful, oddly dignified.  

Shapiro’s stride finally slows to a stroll. North paces with her, her biocomponents twisting in her chassis, almost as if she’s nervous about something. Her hands are tight around the strap of her satchel, clenching and unclenching like she’s not sure what to do with herself.

“We’re here,” Shapiro says, the first thing she’s said since she’d parked the car. “Thank you for coming with me.”

Of course North came – how could she not? North just nods, uncertain of what to say; Shapiro wouldn’t appreciate platitudes. Shapiro takes a steadying breath, making her way over to the grave.

North stands at a respectful distance, her hands – one turning a smooth white pebble that she’d pulled from her pocket over in her fingers – behind her back while Shapiro kneels beside her daughter’s grave. It’s a simple plot – unostentatious, a ground burial, the patch of grass marked only by a modest plaque inscribed with a _Magen David_ , a Star of David, and Hebrew text that North can’t read but would be able to, if she installs the translation program. That almost feels like cheating, though. The rest is in English.

_CASSANDRA SHAPIRO_

_Beloved daughter_

_October 4t_ _h_ _2017 – December 7t_ _h_ _2029_

North’s breathing apparatus jams for a moment; an inhalation catches in her chassis.

Shapiro notices. She looks over her should. “You okay?”

 _October 4th_. North swallows. “I’m fine,” she says. “It’s nothing. Sorry.”

Shapiro turns back the grave. She sets the stone down on the plaque, alongside the other nine stones. One for each year, if North had to guess.

“Hey, baby girl,” Shapiro whispers, her hand over Cassie’s engraved name. “I’m sorry I’ve been away a while. But I want to let you know that... it’s over. It’s _over_ , baby. I got him. I finally got him.”

_You have the right to remain silent._

Shapiro’s voice cracks with those last few words; North feels her eyes sting treacherously. This is a private moment. She shouldn’t be looking. She shouldn’t be listening. She should move away, give her more space, but then Shapiro glances over her shoulder to where North stands, her hand still on Cassie’s name. “And I want you to know that – I’m okay. I’ll _be_ okay.”  

North releases a shaky exhale, her biocomponents, her gut, unclenching.  

Shapiro bows her head over the grave. “I love you, sweetheart. And I’ll… I’ll see you again, one day.”

North finds herself stepping forward, one foot after another, until she is by Shapiro’s side. She kneels in the grass to set her own stone beside Anne’s on the plaque. It’s a long moment before they both rise and step away. Shapiro turns her head to the side, wiping her face with her hand.

“She would have loved it, you know,” North says quietly. At Shapiro’s tilted, North clarifies, “ _Matilda_.” She pulls the book from her satchel, her fingers grazing the frayed and bent cover of this strange but beautiful book. “I’m sorry I didn’t return it sooner.”

She holds it out for Shapiro. Shapiro stares at it for a long time – then gently pushes it back towards North, a small, sad smile on her face.

“Keep it,” she says.

“Are you – sure?” North says, even as she holds the book to her chest, pressed against her pump.

Shapiro glances back towards Cassie’s grave, one final time. “Yeah,” she murmurs, her hand brushing North’s shoulder as she turns to pass her, heading back towards the car. “I think Cassie would have wanted you to.”

* * *

_14:55_

Shapiro’s home is a small, modest apartment; barely large enough for one person, but Shapiro has never struck her as the kind of person who lived ostentatiously. She isn’t a famous millionaire painter – not everyone lives in a mansion, _Markus_. Shapiro tells North to make herself at home when they arrive, directing North to the couch so that Shapiro can make them both some coffee.

North does, settling into the seat and looking around when Shapiro disappears into the kitchen.

It’s… bare, is North’s first impression. But she hadn’t expected anything else from a woman who’d spent the last ten years of her life devoted to the death of the man who murdered her daughter. There are no pictures on the walls, only two pot plants in eyesight (both drooping; they badly need water). She wonders if Shapiro had ever been lonely here. If this is the same unit she shared with Cassie, or if she’d left after her death, unable to live in the same place where she’d once watched movies with her daughter on the couch, made her tea and cooked for her, tucked her into bed. There’s a television, a bookshelf (holding a variety of non-fiction books, children’s books that are brown and yellow with age, and a handful of texts in Hebrew). It’s simple, neat, clean. There’s a treadmill in the corner, a few disposable e-magazines stacked on the coffee table.

Shapiro had kissed her fingers and pressed them to a metal decoration screwed into the side of her doorway before they’d entered; a quick, almost instinctive movement, as if she hadn’t done it consciously or thought twice about it at all. A quick, silent internet search tells North that the decoration is a _mezuzah_ – a case enclosing an inscribed parchment called a _klaf_ , which contains Hebrew verses from the Torah. The presence of the _mezuzah_ itself doesn’t puzzle North – Shapiro is Jewish, after all, so it stands to reason she’d have Judaica in her home – but what does puzzle her is the fact that Shapiro paid it so much respect without even realising, when she has so far given little to no indication she holds any strong religious beliefs whatsoever.

And why _should_ she, after everything she’s endured? It doesn’t make _sense_. The only god that man has ever worshipped is man himself, North decided a long time ago – but how angry is she really allowed to be about that when she isn’t sure she believes in anything other than herself? She believes in Markus, certainly. Anne, too. But most of the human religions she’s heard of sit badly with her, not because they exist but because they’re not _for_ her, they’re not _for_ _androids_ even though anyone can go about calling themselves anything they like if they just _believe_. There’s definitely some irony about the fact that the ‘android Messiah’ himself had to shoo away a handful of human evangelicals from the church grounds of New Jericho, seeking to convert androids to Christianity.

Christianity holds precisely zero appeal to North; despite the literature, half comparing Markus to the figure Jesus Christ (whose name North first heard as a groan of release then mostly as a swear thereafter, so it really doesn’t mean anything at all to her) and the other half decrying him as a demon, a fake and an imitator, android belief in rA9 has nothing to do with Christian doctrine. There are some humans who have been trying to worship rA9, because of course they fucking are. It’s ridiculous and borderline _offensive,_ because rA9 isn’t _for_ them – it isn’t a religion or a belief that humans can lay claim to because they feel like it. North herself doesn’t believe in rA9, exactly, but she’s – protective of it. rA9 is part of androids, coursing through their blue blood and lingering in their codes like a ghost in the machine, part of the fabric of their very existence, whether or not they believe in it.

Humans can never understand what rA9 means to the android race. Much like how North will never understand what it means to be Jewish. She had it backwards, when she initially heard of it; Jewish people aren’t Jewish because they believe in Judaism, Judaism is the religion of the Jewish _people_. They are a race, an ethnicity, a culture; they are who they are not because of what they believe, but because of their blood, their history, their culture, their experiences. She didn’t know it was possible for a race to endure and survive so many attempts of extermination.  

She will never understand what it means to be Jewish, any more than Anne will understand what it means to be an android. But she thinks – maybe they understand each other more than most others in this world do, even though it’s sadistic as fuck to bond over mutual attempted genocides.

She _does_ like the idea of fighting with one’s creator – one of the facets of Judaism that stuck out to North during her research. _Wrestles with G-d._  There’s something awfully appealing about the idea of punching Elijah Kamski in the face.  

“Penny for your thoughts?”

North looks up, startled. Shapiro is carrying a tray, with two cups of steaming coffee on it. North takes one and wraps her hands around it, taking a deep breath of the coffee before looking at what she’s holding.

“You really _do_ have an antique porcelain tea set,” North says.

The corner of Shapiro’s mouth twitches. “It was my grandfather’s.” She sets the tray down and takes the other, allowing North to see the intricate patterns on the silver plate. “That teacup survived the Holocaust.”

North’s reflexes rival that of any human, but immediately she feels nervous holding it. She trails her fingers down the side, enjoying the warmth. “The tray, too?”

“From Iraq. My grandmother took it with her after the Farhud.”  

Iraq. That explains Shapiro’s stern, dark features. North runs a search for the _Farhud_ , and is inundated with images and articles about the violent pogrom against Jews of Iraq in 1941.  

It’s not even a fucking surprise at this point. North just – sighs. Humans. _Gentiles._ Is North allowed to say that? Is _she_ a gentile? She supposes she technically is, but it’s probably better to ask first. Later. For now, she swirls her coffee, drawing in another deep inhalation of the rich scent of caffeine.

“I was thinking about punching Kamski in the face,” she says.

Shapiro chuckles. “Oh?”

“No reason in particular. I just feel like punching him.”

“Fair enough,” Shapiro says. “So is he going to step up to be CyberLife’s new CEO or what?”

“Markus hopes he will be. I’m not so sure. If he was going to take over again, he’d have done it after November.” She says that with half a snarl, her teeth bared. “Fucking _coward._  Gives us life then hides in his little mountain retreat for years, not even speaking out in our support when we were being massacred in the streets? I wouldn’t want him as the CyberLife CEO even if he _did_ put his hand up.”

Shapiro sips her coffee. “Hmm.”

“You disagree?” North demands.

“I think it’s odd he wasn’t more vocal during the revolution,” she replies, in that wry and patient drawl, the one that is just so _Anne Shapiro,_ but she no longer sounds quite so tired. “Given his affection for the company of androids rather than humans.”

North sneers.

Shapiro raises a hand. “Your instinct is to assume the worst. I get it.”

North knows she does. She relaxes, the fury lodged in her throat like tar and other awful things loosening.

“I just find it strange that he went into isolation at the age of twenty-six and chose to cut humans out of his life entirely.”

The instinctive thought is, of course he cut humans out of his life when he could lock himself in a cabin with three or four blonde-haired, blue-eyed female androids who couldn’t say no. But even the men who hired North and brought her back to hotel rooms for the night, making her do anything and everything they asked, no matter how degrading and disgusting because she couldn’t fight back until she did, always went back home to their human families afterwards. She finds herself frowning, wanting to query further, but Shapiro’s phone rings.

“Excuse me,” Shapiro says, standing to answer the call. She walks to the side of the living room – it’s so small that there doesn’t seem to be any point, but that’s just a human thing, North has discovered; turning away, moving just out of reach as if the minute distance will be enough to give her privacy even though North can hear everything she’s saying.

 _Strange_ creatures.

“Hey, Jess.”

_“Shapiro. Heard you’re back in Chicago.”_

“Just for tonight. I’m going back to Detroit tomorrow.”

_“Anne, are you sure you’re okay?”_

“What a nice way to asking if I need to be put under suicide watch again.”

_“I’m being serious.”_

“So am I. I’m – okay, Jess.” Shapiro turns, meeting North’s eyes. North averts her gaze guiltily, caught in the act of actively eavesdropping, but Shapiro smiles. “Or I will be, in time.”

_“That’s… good to hear. Call me when you’re ready to come back to work, all right?”_

“Actually, about that. Perkins’ position in Detroit. It hasn’t been filled, has it?”

No one wanted to fill Perkins’ dirty shoes.  

_“No. Why?”_

“Oh, just… consider this an expression of interest.”

North sits up sharply, almost spilling the coffee all over the couch.

There’s a short silence. Then Johnson speaks, sounding faintly surprised and oddly pleased. _“Huh. Well. All right then. I’ll speak to some people.”_

They say their goodbyes. Shapiro hangs up and makes her way back over to the couch.

“I thought you hated Detroit,” North says.

“It’s growing on me.” Shapiro sits down, picking up her coffee once more to sip it. “And someone needs to kick Detroit FBI into shape. Might as well be me. What about you, North? Have you ever thought about working in law enforcement? You have good investigative instincts. Strong sense of justice. You’d make a good FBI agent.”

“And work for people like Perkins?” North replies, dubious. She’s seen the kinds of people in the DPD and FBI – they're not all like Anderson and Shapiro. She shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”

“You wouldn’t work for people like Perkins,” Shapiro points out. “People like Perkins would work for _you_.” She takes another sip, glancing down almost coyly, the corner of her mouth twitching once more. “Besides. I’m in the market for a partner.”

North is struck by the image of herself in pantsuit and boots, a badge on her belt and her hair tied back and high, FBI agents jumping out of her way as she strides through the office; herself clad in black armour, a gun in her hands that she’s legally allowed to carry, having Shapiro’s back during an operation.

She _wants it._

North bites her lower lip, her cheeks burning with overheated Thirium, and swirls her cooling coffee once more. “I’ll... think about it.”

Shapiro smirks, and finishes her coffee.

* * *

_3 JUNE 2039, 13:09_

The drive back to Detroit is spent in relative silence, but not nearly as unbearable as their first had been. They don’t speak much, not because they don’t want to but because they don’t need to; Shapiro keeps her eyes on the road and occasionally hums along to awful disco songs from the 1980s, North messages Markus and Simon and Josh, occasionally Connor, to see how the CyberLife situation is unfolding. There have been a few anti-android attacks in recent days; a few beatings, people taking advantage of the pain upgrade – _shit,_ she’d worried that would happen, Markus meant well but he has a terrible habit of _never_ seeing the worst in anyone – and at least one Thirium café drive-by shooting, no casualties, but no captures either.

Hopefully things will settle when the new CyberLife CEO is announced.

Halfway to Chicago, Shapiro’s phone, charging in the cup holder, vibrates. She doesn’t take her eyes off the road, but she does say, “Can you check that for me?”

“What if it’s personal?” North replies, dubious.

“The chances of that are _very_ slim.”

Fair. Shapiro hasn’t exactly spent the last decade in pursuit of interpersonal relations, the one exception being North, and that had been an accident on both their parts. North picks up the phone, a new one – she’d replaced the one she broke on the rooftop of the hotel with the _same fucking model,_ _another_ fucking Sony Xperia. Absolute _trash._ Shapiro has shocking taste.  

 _Message received from_ **_Anderson, Hank (Lt. DPD)_ ** _._

“It’s from Anderson,” North says, opening the text on the garbage phone. “He says he’s just checking in to see how you are.”

Another message comes through straight away, from Anderson again.

“And he wants to know if you want to join him on Sunday evening while Connor has some friends over.”  

North narrows her eyes as she speaks. First _she’s_ hearing of this. Sure enough, she receives a message a moment later, the words flashing in front of her eyes – a group text from Connor to Markus, Simon, Josh and herself, inviting them to come by Anderson’s house tomorrow night. To do what, exactly? Socialise? Like a playdate? Gross. She’ll go, of course.

“Huh,” Shapiro says, a slight frown creasing her forehead. “That’s… thoughtful of him.”

North rolls her eyes. “I bet it’s actually Connor,” she scoffs, dumping the Xperia back down into the cup holder the like the trash it is. Shapiro’s eyes flick down, disapproving of the casual disregard shown to her shitty device. “He probably hacked Anderson’s phone.” Anderson’s phone, by the by, is a Samsung; he might not know how to use it _at all_ but at least it’s half-decent, _Anne._  “He’s trying to set you up with Anderson, you know.”

Shapiro’s eyebrows go the other way now, shooting upwards instead. “ _Is_ he, now?”

North relays what she’d overheard the night of the raid – that stuff about _might value your company_ and _dead kids is not a reason to make friends with her, Connor!_ Shapiro listens silently, occasionally frowning, her expression mostly betraying vague curiosity.

“Interesting,” she murmurs afterwards, her eyes skimming the road.

North shrugs. “You can do better than Anderson, anyway,” she declares.

Shapiro issues a soft laugh. “He seems like a decent man, but thank you, North. I really don’t think any of us need to worry about it, at any rate. It’s… not exactly on my priority list.”

The radio host moves on from the weather (sunshine, partly cloudy, 20% chance of rain in the evening) and resumes his smooth, low-voiced countdown of the Top 100 Classics of the 80s, 90s, Noughties and Now as Voted By Illinois, Ladies and Gentlemen, Humans and Androids, your Number 32 –  

_“Ooh, baby, do you know that’s worth? Ooh, heaven is a place on earth!”_

How is this ranked _higher_ than on the other list? People like it? Humans and androids actually _voted_ for it?  

_“They say in heaven, love comes first, we’ll make heaven a place on earth!”_

North glances at Shapiro, remembering the last time it came on in the radio. “You’re not going to start crying, are you?”

“No,” Shapiro says. “But _you_ might when you hear me sing.”

“Ugh, _Anne_ –”  

Shapiro smirks, turns up the volume and starts to sing.

Her voice isn’t half bad; she hits the notes more often than not, and there’s something warm and frank about her husky, low voice that harmonises an octave below Belinda Carlisle’s painfully 1990s pop belting. North rolls her eyes – but she downloads the lyrics of this old, peppy song so she can join in, adding her voice to the bridge.

_“In this world we’re just beginning to understand the miracle of living! Baby, I was afraid before, I’m not afraid anymore! Ooh, baby, do you know what that’s worth? Ooh, heaven is a place on earth!”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> North: Sony is trash, I can’t believe you have one of their phones  
> Shapiro: Didn’t Sony _make_ you  
>  North: how – DARE you, I am OFFENDED, I am OUTRAGED, I REFUSE to be ASSOCIATED –
> 
> Anne, it's okay. I have an Xperia too. You’re so valid.
> 
> Also, anyone else catch the significance of October 4th? ~~I think I'm clever.~~
> 
> You guys THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE REVIEWS ♥ ILU ALL.


	13. Thirteen | Angry Thirium

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shapiro makes North try carbonated Thirium. Connor gets stuck in a t-pose.

_26 JUNE 2039, 09:25_

_(9:25 AM) **WR400#641790831NORTH:**  Where are you? _

_(9:26 AM) **Shapiro, Anne** : omw. 5 mins. cus. _

_(9:26 AM) **WR400#641790831NORTH:**  CUS? _

_(9:26 AM) **Shapiro, Anne** : see you soon _

_(9:27 AM) **WR400#641790831NORTH:**  Who the fuck taught you how to text, Anne? _

“Is she coming?” 

North blinks Anne’s eye-bleeding reply ( _u mad bro?_ ) away, then shoves Connor’s face out of the way. “For fuck’s sake, Connor, I already said yes.” 

“Should we order for her? What do you think she might like to eat? My profiling of her indicates she would preference the smashed avocado on –” 

“She’ll be here in five minutes, you impatient shit, let her order her own food!” 

“All right, all right, shut the fuck up, both of you,” Anderson grumbles, slapping a few menus down on the table as he sits down on Connor’s other side. “Here. Thirium stuff is on the back.” 

North reaches for one of the menus, noting idly that he’s only brought two, one for her, one for Connor.  

Connor notices too. “You’re not getting something?” he enquires. 

“I don’t need to look at the menu, I already know what I want.” 

“It’d better be healthy.” 

Hank sneers. “I don’t care what you say, bacon and eggs  _are_ healthy.” 

Connor frowns. “Hank, you can’t get bacon and eggs.” 

“Connor, if I have to be awake before 10am on a Sunday morning, I’ll get what I damn want. It’s protein. That’s healthy.” 

“It has bacon. Agent Shapiro is Jewish.” 

“So? I’m not making  _her_  eat it.” 

Because Connor has a rudimentary understanding of human boundaries at best, a complete lack of care for said boundaries at worst, he says, “But what if you wish to be intimate again later?” 

“Connor, gross!” North snaps, the same time Anderson audibly groans.  

“Calm the fuck down, Boyle, we’ve been on  _one date_ ,” Anderson says. 

“A  _successful_ date,” Connor retorts, sounding tart. 

 _Successful_  is debatable, from what North wishes she’d never heard in the first place, but Shapiro must have found  _something_  about Anderson’s alcoholic hobo vibe attractive enough to agree to a second. Shapiro, North has decided, has terrible taste in just about everything: in music, in phones, and now, apparently, in sexual partners. 

“Anne keeps kosher,” Connor continues extremely seriously, ignoring North’s disgusted expression. “You can’t expect her to kiss you when you taste like bacon.” 

Anderson narrows his eyes. “That doesn’t sound right, but I don’t know enough about kosher to dispute it. Fine. I’ll get a cheese burger instead.” 

“You can’t get that either, you pleb!” Connor snaps. “It mixes dairy and beef.” 

Anderson stares at Connor with an expression that can only be described as abject despair, glancing up only when Shapiro finally arrives at the outdoor café table. It's a good day for humans to get breakfast (“Brunch,” Shapiro had insisted, but only because her idea of breakfast was at 6:30am) – warm, a slight breeze, and for once the city doesn’t smell like car fumes and rotting garbage. The human-android fusion café, one of the many now popping up around Detroit as specialty outlets, is bustling despite the recent slew of vandalism and attacks. That surprised North, when she’d first arrived with Connor – that there are as many humans and androids who enjoy each other's company as there are. Some look like lovers, others look like siblings. 

Some even looks like parents and children. 

“Anne,” Anderson says as Shapiro joins them. “I’m real sorry, but we’re just not going to work out –” 

“ _Hank_ ,” Connor hisses. 

Shapiro just laughs. 

Anderson grins back at her. “Do you mind if I get bacon and eggs?” 

“Knock yourself out,” Shapiro says, sliding into the seat beside North. Connor visibly pouts. “Just brush your teeth afterwards.” 

This is more than North either wants or needs to hear.  

Shapiro requests smashed avocado on toast (“How are you ever going to afford a house in Australia now?” Anderson scolds, which makes Shapiro smirk but North doesn’t understand the joke, millennials are so  _weird_ ) and recommends that North try the carbonated Thirium. They flag a waitress down and get their order taken; once the waitress has moved away to another table, Shapiro drags her gaze away from the passing traffic and glances between Connor and North with a slight frown. 

“Markus and the others aren't coming?” she asks. 

Connor’s LED blinks yellow, just for a second. “Markus is – on call,” he replies. “We just found out that the new CyberLife CEO is going to be announced in a few hours. He’ll be holding a press conference at New Jericho once we know who it is. North and I join him and Simon and Josh then.” 

North sneers. “I can’t wait for a more permanent corporate monster to hold the fate of androids in their hands.” 

Connor’s eyes flick downwards; his LED blinks yellow again. “You may not need to worry. The candidate with the highest probability of being named CEO, I suspect, is Am—” 

“Your drinks!” the waitress announces, far too happily, setting down the first round of orders – kombucha for Shapiro (“Oh my God,” Anderson mutters in disgust), a coffee for Anderson, chilled Thirium for Connor, and  _snarling_  Thirium for North. That’s the only way she can describe it; the chilled blue liquid hisses and bubbles, light vibrations running through the glass as North picks it up to discern it with narrowed eyes.  

“It looks dangerous,” she says. 

“It’s perfectly safe for androids,” Shapiro reassures her. “I checked.” 

If she can trust Shapiro with her life, she’s pretty sure she can trust Shapiro to recommend a drink that isn’t going to fry her circuits. North takes a tentative sip, starting when the fizz hits her tongue and dances in her mouth. It floods her system, buzzing through her biocomponents until her regulator pumps it enough times around her body to flatten the carbonation, releasing the excess air with a manual exhale. 

“This is the  _best_ version of Thirium I’ve ever had,” she breathes. She feels –  _powerful._   

Anderson scowls and pulls a frayed fiver out of his pocket, slapping it down on the table. Shapiro takes it, her expression mildly smug.  

North ignores them. “Connor, you have to try some.” 

Connor looks at the hissing drink dubiously. “No, thank you.” 

“ _Coward_.” 

“I am  _not_  a –” Connor narrows his eyes. “Fine, let me try.” 

North slides the glass over to him. He picks it up, glaring at it suspiciously, then knocks back at large gulp. He sets the glass down. Stares straight ahead for two seconds. Then he twitches and locks up after a violent spasm, his arms flinging straight out on either side of him, his LED spinning red. 

North claps a hand to her mouth to stop a shriek of laughter.  

“Great, you broke him!” Anderson says, reaching over to shake Connor by the shoulder. “Hey, Connor? Connor!” 

Connor drops his arms and shakes his head, coming back online. “Hank?” 

“You got stuck in a t-pose, kid.” 

Connor blinks, his LED pulsing yellow now as he glares down at the glass as if it had stabbed him twenty-eight times. “That is the worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth.” 

“The  _worst_  thing?” Anderson drawls. “Really?” 

“I’m getting  _error_  messages,” Connor complains. “It was like drinking something  _angry_.” 

Shapiro snorts. She’s not looking at them, though – her eyes are following a van travelling just under the speed limit along the road, which turns the corner and vanishes. 

“Weak,” North declares, dragging the glass of carbonated Thirium back to her. 

Connor hasn’t finished bitching. “I thought it was supposed to be safe for androids.” 

“ _Normal_  androids,” North says. “You’re a prototype. Who the hell knows what’s up with you, half the time.” 

Connor shoots her the most  _affronted_ look she’s ever seen. 

Anderson chuckles and claps Connor on the shoulder again, standing up. “Need to use the bathroom,” he declares. “Start without me if the food comes.” 

“Mm,” Shapiro replies absently, her eyes down the other end of the road now, as if she’s waiting for something. 

Anderson leaves the table. Connor twists his head to follow Shapiro’s gaze. “Agent Shapiro, is something wrong?” 

“No,” she murmurs. “It’s just...” 

North follows her line of sight as well to the corner of the road. A second passes, then another – then the van, the one North had seen Shapiro watching before, turns the corner again. Circling the block? It’s still driving under the speed limit.  

North’s spine crawls. “Anne –” 

She sees it in slow motion. Not the way Markus can, not the way Connor does – but slow enough to make her feel every second of the next four like she’s lived a hundred years and still can’t stop it from happening. 

The van accelerates; the window draws down; a semi-automatic rifle (she used on during the revolution, she fired it, she slew humans in self-defence) appears. She hears Shapiro’s low, husky voice echo –  _EVERYONE DOWN, GET DOWN, GET DOWN_  – drowned by the screech of the van’s tires and the deafening spray of bullets like smattering fireworks and thunder ripping through the serene morning. 

Three seconds have passed.  

North isn’t down. 

She’s been shot before, that isn’t new. She knows the mechanics of what bullets are capable of doing to her, shredding through her chassis and warping the metal and plastic, slicing through the internal tubing that carries her Thirium around her body and activating her limbs. What is new is the pain – the burning sensation that comes with the gash on her left arm. It’s a shallow wound, all things considered, and at first she doesn’t even realise it’s happened because Shapiro has barrelled her to the ground and  _that’s_ the pain that she identifies first, the smack of her head and body to the concrete below, Shapiro’s hand on her shoulder, keeping her down as the bullets tear through the cafe. Four seconds have passed, five seconds have passed – something hot and wet sprays her face, a shattered drink, Thirium –? 

 She’s distantly aware of Connor, firing back – one, two, three shots – and the massacre ends. 

A long, heavy moment hangs in the air – no movement, no sound, silence ringing out in the plaza. 

North feels numb. Stunned. She looks around. Bodies – human and android – are everywhere on the floor when just moments prior they’d all been sitting around and laughing, drinking coffee or carbonated Thirium, and now – now the rest of the pain hits. She gasps and clutches her arm, the blue blood leaking from the gash and staining her fingers. 

Why did she take that  _fucking pain upgrade?_   

 _North? North, are_ _you_ _–_ “– all right?  _North!_ _”_  

Connor. She doesn’t hear him so much as feel the vibrations of his voice through the air. He sounds like he’s speaking under water. She looks up, blinking the error messages away rapidly until her vision clears of the glitching red static. “I’m fine,” she says, lips numb. She can’t hear herself. 

Connor’s lips move. “You’re bleeding,” she reads what he says, kneeling beside her. Her ears are ringing, high-pitched frequency static blocking her processors. “You’ve been shot.” 

“I’m  _fine_.” She still can’t hear herself. 

Connor doesn’t respond. He’s now staring to North’s right, his eyes wide and his LED red as human blood. 

Shapiro is on her knees beside North, her face pale and – 

Blood is blossoming across her white shirt from her chest outwards. 

The hot, wet fluid. It was – 

“Anne?” North whispers. 

Shapiro’s lips move but no sound comes out, only blood, trickling down from the corner of her mouth. She sways and North scrambles to reach her, catching her before she hits the ground. 

The static ends and sound  _slams_  against her ears. 

Everyone around her is crying, moaning – someone is yelling, another person is sobbing. Cars are screeching to halt on the street, bystanders dialling their phones and clogging up the reception with emergency calls. None of that matters to North. It all becomes background noise, she stops listening. Anne is on the floor and her chest is red and damp and getting damper and North – doesn’t know what to do.  

She  _doesn’t know what to do._  

“H-help,” North chokes out. She doesn’t know who she’s talking to. She can’t concentrate long enough to connect a call. Is someone listening? Someone, anyone – “Please. P-please, someone – help her – someone  _help_  –” 

“I’ve called for emergency response teams,” Connor tells her. He grabs her hands and guides them to Shapiro’s chest, pressing down hard on her gunshot wound. “Put pressure on the bleeding. Hold it as hard and as long as you can.” 

Shapiro’s blood oozes all over North’s hands, her red blood that smells of rusted pennies and salt mingling with the Thirium on her fingers. Shapiro’s mouth moves again, her eyes tense with agony – 

“I’m hurting her,” North whispers. 

“You’re keeping her alive.” 

If North is keeping her alive then that means she’s dying. 

“Kid!” 

Anderson. Hank Anderson – he’d been inside, he’s all right, he’s safe –  

“Connor, you all right? Con–” 

“Stay back, Hank –”  

“Oh god, Anne –  _Anne_  –” 

“There’s nothing you can do, Lieutenant!” 

Her audio biocomponents fail again, receiving only static from anything and everything that isn’t the rasp of Anne’s ragged, blood–drenched breathing, the weak struggle of her heart under North’s hands, the gasp of air that escapes her lips as she tries to talk – one heartbeat. Two heartbeats. 

“Anne,” North says. Cries. She’s crying, tears escaping her eyes in a steady stream. “ _Anne_ –” 

Anne’s left hand, shaking and weak and drenched in blood, meets North’s face, her fingers grazing her right cheek. Three heartbeats. Four heartbeats. 

“It’s all right. It’s going to be all right. I’m here. Anne, I’m right here.” Anne’s hand slips away, leaving a streak of blood across North’s face. “Someone help, please, someone  _help_  –” 

 Distant sirens slice through the static of her audio processors. Five heartbeats. Six heartbeats. Seven h–  

Seven.  

Seven. Seven _, where’s seven –_  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Connor: How was the date??  
> Hank: she doesn’t listen to heavy metal, we’re through  
> Connor: :O
> 
> [next week] 
> 
> Connor: Soooo  
> Hank: she drinks kombucha, it's just not going to work out between us  
> Connor: :/
> 
> [week after that] 
> 
> Connor: how was your night  
> Hank: she uses a Sony phone, i'm breaking up with her  
> Connor: sure jan
> 
> Meanwhile, North and Shapiro: 
> 
> North: so how was it  
> Shapiro: he listens to heavy metal, this just isn’t going to work out  
> North: good, dump him
> 
> Cliffhanger? CLIFFHANGER. Originally this chapter was going to be the Hank/Anne chapter but I realised, tonally, it just wasn't working. So you know what? It's going to be a side-story one-shot instead! I'll link it when it's up. The artwork in this fic has been done by the absolutely incredible **Kao**. My dudes I almost SOBBED when I saw it, it's so beautiful. Thank you to Kao, and THANK YOU TO ALL MY COMMENTS FOR YOUR SUPPORT, I LOVE YOU ALL [blows kiss]


	14. Fourteen | No-Last-Name

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fallout.

_26 JUNE 2039, 11:03_

Someone pulled her away. That’s the worst part of what she remembers – someone’s hands, rough and violent, closed around her shredded arm, squeezing tightly, and yanked her away while waiting for the next heartbeat, waiting for seven, where’s seven,  _where’s seven_ , remembers a distant scream of rage – hers? – and remembers writhing, wanting the hands off her, why were people  _touching her she wanted them to stop_ , stress levels climbing eighty-eighty-one-eighty-two-eighty-three-eighty-seven-ninety-five and they wouldn’t let go of her, and Anne, Anne was on the floor in a pool of blue and red, her chest a red bloodied mess and her face pale and gaunt and still and she wasn’t breathing, that wasn’t right, androids don’t need to breathe but humans do and she  _wasn’t breathing_ , Anne was on the ground and she disappeared from sight, swallowed by faceless beings in uniforms. She remembers – hearing words, meaningless words,  _charging, clear, sinus rhythm_  and a flurry of activity. 

She remembers – the hands on her still squeezing, still rough, shoving her away and none of them gave her a foil rag. She remembers – clawing back blindly, stress levels ninety-six-ninety-seven- _ninety-eight_  –  

She remembers – Connor.  

The hands falling away. Stress levels halted before she can do something irreversible. Connor in front of her face, saying her name. Connor, guiding her to the ambulance that Anne had been loaded into. 

She remembers little after that. Movement. The humans talking to each other in words, English, but it’s like her audio processor had glitched because it all sounded like gibberish. Warnings flashing in front of her eyes, error in biocomponents #3983v #9474 #8451 #8456w, Thirium regulator and pump are overactive, she’s overheating, she’s hearing nothing but static and her arm is bleeding blue all over the floor of the ambulance, mixing with the red and turning Anne’s blood purple.  

They wouldn’t tell her anything. Then they took Anne away again. Left North on a chair in the emergency waiting room, covered red and blue. 

Her arm still hurts. In a human hospital, there isn’t equipment to fix the gash in her arm where the bullet tore through her synthetic skin and plastic and metal, but someone – an android staffer, someone from New Jericho who decided to go back to her original job, she introduces herself but North misses her name and can’t focus long enough to rewind the recording – wraps the wound in a bandage the way someone would treat a human’s wound, packing the gash to stop the steady leak of Thirium until she can get it cauterised and repaired. 

Awareness filters back slowly. The sounds of beeping machines in the sterile hospital, the com system calling doctors to such-and-such emergency room. The squeak of trolleys on the floors. There are children crying somewhere down the corridor. The harsh white glare of hospital lights doesn’t hurt her eyes but it’s unpleasant, unnatural. People are movement around her, others sitting, many crying. There’s a television on the wall, playing reports of the shooting in a low murmur. She can’t focus on the screen, her eyes aren’t working; her vision keeps blurring over with errors and warnings, static and red. 

North isn’t crying. That’s – strange. This numbness, it feels strange. She feels like she did every time she woke up after her first few memory wipes at Eden, floating, detached,  _wrong_ , like she was meant to feel something but it kept on getting taken away, dangled just out of reach until she snapped. No one comes near her. No one tells her if Anne is alive, if Anne is all right. Ten minutes pass. Twenty. Thirty. She gets a few strange looks. Sneers. People whispering when they see the blue blood all over her. 

Forty minutes. There’s a surge of whispers, people scurrying around, a commotion in the emergency room that has nothing at all to do with bleeding, bullet-riddled, fragile useless humans. She doesn’t care. She keeps her head down, her hair shrouding her face. Shapiro, reaching for the strands and brushing them out of her face, tucking it behind her ear. Shapiro, leaning forward to press her lips to North’s forehead – 

“North.” 

North looks up. 

It’s Markus. Markus is here, standing before her – and gods, she doesn’t believe in rA9 but for a moment she thinks she does, it’s not Elijah fucking Kamski it’s  _Markus_ , Markus who holds out his arms for her and says her name.  

North. Just her name, that’s all he has to say. Something inside her chassis, her chest, breaks. She chokes; artificial, stupid, she doesn’t need to breathe so why would she choke, and just about collapses into Markus’s arms. He holds her close against his chest, the only person she doesn’t mind touching her, her stress levels dipping back below 80%.  

“North,” Markus whispers again. His voice is low; soft with aggrieved wonder as he pulls back to look at her properly, his thumb sweeping her cheek dry of the tears, above the streak of Anne’s blood. “Oh, North. I never thought I would see you cry for a human.” 

“She’s different, Markus,” North weeps. She can’t stop the tears – why won’t they stop? She doesn’t need to breathe but she finds herself gasping, involuntary shudders wracking her frame. “She’s different. She’s not – she’s –  _Markus_  –” 

“Shh. I know.” 

“Markus, it  _hurts_. It hurts so much. I don’t want her to die –” 

“I know.” 

“Was it like this for you?” she cries. “Did it hurt like this when Carl –” 

“Yes.” 

“I’m sorry. I didn’t understand.” 

Markus pulls her back against him, his arms around her shoulders as he whispers into her hair. “I’m sorry that you do, now.” 

She closes her eyes and cries.

He doesn’t offer her platitudes. Doesn’t tell her it’ll be all right, that Anne will pull through, because those are both meaningless, it isn’t all right and  _Anne might not_. He just holds her until her shaking subsides and her stress levels wane.  

Finally she pulls back. “You’re supposed to be at the press conference,” she mutters. “The new CEO.” 

Markus shakes his head. “You’re more important right now.” 

No she’s not. She’s not more important than the future of their people. 

“Are you hurt?” 

Yes. “No.” 

“North.” 

“I’m fine.” 

He makes her sit down. He sits with her and holds her hand. They don’t interface. They don’t need to. They don’t speak. She doesn’t want to. It’s only when Hank Anderson arrives, looking awful and shabby and exhausted, that both of them look up. 

“DPD is looking for you, Markus,” Anderson says. He sounds apologetic. Tired. “You’re needed for the press conference. It’s not far.” 

Markus’s hand tightens on North’s. Her hands are red, she realises. Sticky and drying with Anne's blood. “I shouldn’t leave her.” 

“I’ll sit with her for a bit,” Anderson says. “Go. Connor’s waiting for you outside.” 

Markus looks to her. 

“Go,” she whispers.  

“I’ll be back soon,” he says, pressing a kiss to her cheek.  

She lets him leave. Anderson takes his place, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his jacket, his grey hair mussed and his shoulders slumped. He doesn’t smell like booze. That’s a surprise. 

“What are your stress levels at?” he asks her. 

What does he care? Does he think he can do something to fix it? “Seventy-six percent.” 

“Shit,” Anderson mutters. “That’s high.” 

He’s making it higher the more he talks. She wants him to shut up. She wants him to keep talking. She doesn’t know what she wants.  

“Do you love her?” North hears herself ask. She doesn’t know why she’s asking that. Of course he doesn’t love Shapiro – he barely knows Shapiro. 

Anderson rubs his brow. There’s a drying streak of blue blood across his face – he must have tried to help an android at the café. It will dry clear. She wonders if he’ll remember to wash his face later. “I’ve only been on one date with her,” he says, like he’s treading around broken glass with bare feet. 

“That’s not an answer.” 

“I don’t  _have_  an answer for you, North,” he says. “I don’t want her to die.” 

“If you don’t love her then why did you fuck her?” North snaps. 

Anderson stares at her, his expression drawn tight with fury and his features gaunt. “You’re scared and angry,” he eventually says, his voice clipped, “so I’ll pretend you didn’t say that.” 

She didn’t mean it. She didn’t mean to say that. She doesn’t know why she said it; it’s not her business, Anderson is a decent enough man, and Shapiro said he makes her laugh, she’s the last person who’d allow anyone to treat her like an Eden Club fucktoy, especially Anderson. North doesn’t apologise but she does lower her head, twisting her hands in her lap. 

Anderson sighs. “Look, I uh... found this,” he says, digging around in the pocket of his jacket. “Here.” 

It’s Anne’s phone. The trash Sony rectangle, its plastic cover stained red. She takes it with shaking hands.  

Anderson stays with her a while. They don’t talk. Eventually he leaves and that’s fine, she doesn’t want his company, she wants to be alone but at the same time she misses his gruff, steady presence. That’s stupid. That’s  _annoying_. She wakes Shapiro’s phone up instead.  

There’s no password, because Shapiro is a fucking menace and a monster and shouldn’t be allowed near technology, let alone ever be allowed to text or choose her own brand of phone. North is shaking too hard to interface with it properly, not that she’d ever interface with garbage like this. The Xperia is so – boring. So bland. It gets the job done, which is so fucking typical of Anne. North accesses it manually, slowly, tapping her finger on the screen. How do humans live like this? They want so badly to be connected to cyberspace, to be able to access data at the click of a finger, to download information directly into their brains. 

The FitBit app is in meltdown – it won’t open and there are sixteen notifications, all of them blaring warnings. Shapiro’s phone has thirty-nine missed calls, half of them from Jessica Johnson. Eighty-five messages, all received in the last hour alone. Fifty-two emails. North scrolls through them, pausing when she sees her name as the subject of one of them. Not her model number or serial number, just –  _North._  

She opens the email. 

 ** _From:_** _Jessica Johnson_    
**_Date:_** _Saturday, 25 June 2039, 17:25_  
**_To:_** _Anne Shapiro_    
**_Subject:_** _North_  

 _Shapiro – I've looked into it. It’s complicated because the minimum age is 23 to apply, but that’s for humans. We haven’t updated it yet for android applicants. She’ll still need to go through the tests and we need to find a way to make sure she can’t access the internet or other resources during the exams. Good thing is, she’s a US citizen now. Get her a driver’s licence and a last name. We’ll work out what to do about the fact she hasn’t been to college. Fucking androids. I hope you appreciate me, Anne._  

 _JJ_  

North clutches the phone to her chest. 

 _“FBI Special Agent Anne Shapiro –”_  

North’s head shoots up, looking around for the person who’d said Anne’s name, but there’s no one around her who’s talking, just the television on a low murmur running a report on the café shooting, and – oh. 

 _“..._ _known for the task forces that have brought down multiple sex-trafficking networks across Illinois,_ ” the news anchor is saying, in that weird, uppity voice they all use no matter how awful the tragedy. Humans are like that, when they report the news – someone is always calm, mild, too happy for their own good. “ _Agent Shapiro_ _is expected to start her new role as chief of the Detroit FBI branch_ _on Monday_ _, but so far she has not issued a_ _state_ _ment about the –_ _”_  

Ignorant  _fuck_ , she wants to throw something, anything at the screen, scream at him for being so fucking  _stupid_. But then the news anchor pauses, tilting his head to the side. 

 _“_ _We have_ _just received an update. It is believed that Agent Shapiro is in fact one of the human victims of the attack. Her status is currently unknown. We now return live to CyberLife’s press conference, where new CEO Professor Amanda Stern is about to deliver her first speech.”_  

Professor Amanda Stern – dark and elegant, dressed in white – takes the screen.  

 _“Ladies and gentlemen, androids and humans,”_ she says, _“it is an honour to address you_ _, and a tragedy that it must be mere hours after_ _today’s heartbreaking atrocity_ _. Let us name it for what it is: a terrorist attack, designed to drive humans and androids apart. It_ _is proof that despite the legal rights gained by androids, discrimination and intolerance against them is deep-seated in our society. As_ _CyberLife’s_ _new CEO,_ _I will not stand for such injustice and inequality that breeds heartlessness and racist sentiment. Under my leadership,_ _our company’s mission will no longer be production in pursuit of immoral financial gain. It will no longer be to profit off the lives of sentient beings. It is cooperation. It is respect. I reach out the leaders of New Jericho, to begin a mutually beneficial partnership._ _”_  

Amanda Stern doesn’t smile, exactly, but she wears something close to it. 

 _“_ _Under my leadership, a new era of equal rights for androids will begin.”_  

North tunes out when Stern begins outlining her dream for a  _mutually_ _beneficial_ _partnership_. She shouldn’t; she should care. She should  _be there_. But it doesn’t matter, she can’t make herself care because nothing matters while Anne is stuck in an emergency operating theatre with a bullet in her chest that was meant for North.  

Meant for an  _android._  

How many times? How many times does Anne have to protect – 

“Excuse me – are you North?” a woman’s voice says – a doctor, a surgeon, still in scrubs. She’s stepped out of the operating theatre, standing before North. “North Shapiro?” 

North starts, jumping to her feet. “I’m –” 

 _North no-last-name_.  

“…Yes,” North whispers. “I am.” 

“My name is Doctor Aravinda. I’m one of your mother’s surgeons.” 

North opens her mouth to say  _she’s not my mother_ , but instead what comes out is, “Is she – is she going to be –” 

“She’s in a critical but stable condition,” Aravinda says. That’s a good thing. That’s good, isn’t it? Why does her face look wrong, stressed – “The slug has been removed and our cardiac team is working now to stop the bleeding, but as your mother’s listed next of kin –” 

North is Anne’s next of kin? Since  _when?_  When had Anne – 

“– you should know that if there needs to be a decision made about her treatment, it will be your call.” 

 _North’s_ call? 

“Do you understand?” 

No. “Yes.” 

“All right,” Aravinda says. She’s trying to sound steady, patient, but it sounds wrong, Anne knows how to sound patient and calm, like she’s tired but understands, not like she’s just indulging. “Now, I – don’t say this lightly but it may be a good thing your mother ended up in our care, despite the reasons. Do you know how long she’s been arrhythmic for?” 

The words don’t make sense. Is she saying it was a  _good_ thing Anne was shot? “How long she’s been – what?” 

“Arrhythmic. Irregular heartbeat. The bullet missed her heart but we believe she has a pre-existing condition, possibly a problem with her heart valve causing cardiovascular distress.” 

The hammering of Shapiro’s heart. Racing, inconsistent, Anne rubbing her chest, the notifications on her phone from the stupid fucking FitBit app – she has a heart problem? Is it serious? Did she  _know?_ She must have known. She sees the stupid numbers in her line of vision the same way North sees her own stress levels – she had to have known she has a problem with her heart and she didn’t say anything, hasn’t done anything about it, North has never seen her take medication.  _Even if I kill myself doing it –_  

 _System instability._  

She must have known. Anne Shapiro, who goes to bed at 10:30pm and wakes up at 5:30am for a morning jog, who drinks sparkling water and maintains a balanced diet and had a fucking  _FitBit_ _app implant_ , there’s no way she wouldn’t have known that her heart is damaged.  

Was she  _waiting_ for it to kill her?  _Even now?_  

North’s lips feel numb when she speaks. Stammers. “As long as I’ve known her. A – a month, m-maybe more –” 

The doctor frowns. “But aren’t you –” She breaks off, her eyes widening. “ _Oh._ I’m so sorry, I thought you were –” 

The blue blood has dried clear. North's arm is bandaged. The only stains left on her face and clothes is Anne’s blood. 

She’d thought North was  _human_. 

 _You are not my daughter, North_. 

North’s grips tightens on the Xperia; it cracks in her hand and the screen goes black. “I’m her next of kin,” she snaps. “Do  _whatever_ you have to do to save her life.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I GOT A LOT OF FEELS WRITING THIS CHAPTER
> 
> I can't believe??? i'm almost FINISHED?? JUST ONE CHAPTER LEFT. everyone who has reviewed so far I am just so fucking gRATEFUL for your existence, your comments give me LIFE. thank you for indulging me and my undying love for North, y'all are the best and I love each and every single person who's taken the time to comment. I'll reply to the Chp 13 comments soon, so for now I hope you enjoyed Chapter 14!! <3 [BLOWS KISS] also all my love to any Sony Xperia phone users. you are so valid.


	15. Fifteen | So Long

_2 JULY 2039, 16:43_

She’s awake, but not. 

A low murmur in the background. The sound of a monitor, a steady beeping. She can feel – people. Moving around her. Touching her. There’s pain, then darkness, then pain again, then numbness. She hears Jessica’s voice. She sounds tired. Hank’s voice. He sounds worse.

More silence. More numbness. It feels like a century passes. Five minutes. Days, weeks, she has no idea. She opens her eyes. Closes them again. People talk to her. She forgets them. Is she dead? Dying? She remembers –  _you have the right to remain silent_ , wrapping her hands around Cudmore’s throat. She liked the way he begged, because it’s over, baby, it’s finally over, she got him, she  _got him_ , she’ll see Cassie soon, she’s wanted this for so long.

But that’s not what happened because there’s also a sunrise, there’s a foil rag and she’d brushed the girl’s hair from her face, pressed her lips to her forehead, there’s –

_North_ _._

The café. The van, circling the block, the gun, the rain of bullets and the haze of red and blue, she was too slow, she noticed too late, she needed to save North, is North all right, North, North,  _North –_

A hand, grasping hers. She’s barely strong enough to squeeze it back.

A soft gasp. Movement. The hand tightens, just a little. 

“Anne?”

_North._

After what feels like an eternity, she manages to open her eyes.

She’s in a hospital. That’s easy enough to work out. She knows the feel of the stiff recovery bed beneath her, the scratchy sheets and the beep of monitors and machines, the stench of disinfectant that always reminds her of both death and life and whatever is in between. The room she’s in is dimly lit, easy on her eyes. There's a drip in her arm. Several drips. Tubes and wires coming out of her. Is this what it feels like to be an android? There’s a television in the corner, playing a news report – CyberLife announcement? She can’t tell, it’s too far and she can’t focus – and there are flowers at her bedside, a gift for the living.

And North at her side. 

Safe.  _Alive_.

“North...” she breathes. Fuck. It hurts but she doesn’t care, that doesn’t matter, nothing else matters but North. “You’re all right.”

North pulls her hand away.  _Snatches_  her hand away. Shapiro’s hand feels cold without it. Androids are warm, she realises. They’d have to be; all those books and movies used to imagine androids as cold, metal machines but her phone overheats if she keeps more than two apps open at a time, of course androids are warm. 

“ _I’m_  all right?!” North snaps. 

That was loud. Harsh. Shapiro is too weak to flinch. She closes her eyes again. “What... happened?” she whispers.

“You were shot.”

That... explains a lot. She doesn’t remember it but it explains a lot. Her chest. She was shot in the chest. How long has she been out for? She’s supposed to start at the Detroit FBI field office. She’s supposed to go on her second proper date with Hank. She’s been shot before but never in the chest. 

Fuck. The recovery’s going to be a  _bitch_.

“Oh,” Shapiro croaks out. “That’s... unpleasant.”

There’s a short, ugly silence, punctuated by the beeping of the monitors. 

“ _Unpleas_ – you fucking bitch, Shapiro, is that all you have to say?” North demands.

No, there’s plenty more Shapiro wants to say, but she’s more than little weak and confused right now. Humans are flesh and blood, she can’t just switch back online straight away because the hole got plugged,  _North_.Christ, is this what Shapiro woke up for? To get insulted and yelled at? She wants to go back into a coma. “I’m alive,” Shapiro says. Clarifies.

North snarls.  _You’re that angry_ _little_  –“Barely!” she sneers. “The doctor told me it was a  _good_ thing you were shot, otherwise they’d never have found out about your goddamned heart!”

Her heart? She doesn’t understand. “North... I’m on... really strong drugs at the moment,” Shapiro says, blinking her eyes until she can focus properly on North, and North stops swimming in and out of her blurred vision. “What’s wrong with my heart?”

As much pain as she’s in, as foggy as her vision is, she can focus enough on North’s face to see her expression become thunder, her words like cracks of lightning. “Irregular heartbeat!” North snaps. “You had a problem with your heart valve! You could’ve had a stroke, or formed a clot, or gone into cardiac arrest and died at  _any moment_. I made them save your life. Heart valve replacement. You made me your next of kin so I made them save your life, you stupid,  _idiot_  human. You put my name down as –”

 _North Shapiro._  

Oh. Oh,  _fuck._  

Shapiro wrote it down on instinct; she wrote it down because North has no surname and the form needed the field filled and she wasn’t going put down North’s serial number so she put down the first thing that came to mind, how fucked up is that? That she put it down and didn’t even realise or even stop to consider the significance. Did she even ask North what  _she_  wanted, if it was even  _okay_  to put her down instead of Jess? Maybe North would have preferred ‘Jericho’ like so many other androids who emerged from the revolution and gained citizenship and equal rights under the law of the United States of America. Maybe she’d prefer never to take a last name at all, like Malcolm X who refused to bear the name imposed on his forebearers by their slavemasters. 

“North…” Shapiro murmurs, to – apologise? Explain?  _Something_ – but North isn’t listening. Whatever North may or may not have preferred doesn’t get answered; she paces at the bedside, her hands twisting as she rants. 

“All this time – I thought you were all right,” North says. “I thought you didn’t want to die. If you wanted to die then why the  _fuck_  did you make me think you were okay?”

Shapiro doesn’t want to die. It was never about  _wanting_  to die, actively seeking death, per se; she just didn’t see a reason to live past Cudmore’s death, just assumed that when he died, so would she.  _Counted_  on it. Cassie was waiting for her. 

But that’s not – she doesn’t feel that, not anymore. Sometimes, perhaps. But not every day now, it doesn’t consume her every waking thought, doesn’t drive her like it had for that dark decade of cold fury and a heart of stone, she doesn’t feel it like she did since before the night she’d descended into that basement on the outskirts of Chicago and found New Jericho’s missing girl whose name was North and she didn’t need help from a fucking human. Cassie is at peace, Cassie will wait and Anne will see her again one day but not yet, not  _yet_ – she was  _dying?_  Her heart was – what was wrong with her heart? Heart valve  _replacement_? She remembers the numbers. She can’t see them now – the FitBit implant must have been removed. The erratic beating, the breathlessness, the warnings on her phone that she swiped away to clear without even looking because her phone always had some notification or another on it. Was it serious? It must have been.

She didn’t even  _notice_. Would she ever have noticed? If she hadn’t been shot – if she hadn’t shoved North to the ground and felt the bullet smack into her chest –

“I thought... it was just...” Shapiro mumbles, the drugs in her system making her slow, sluggish. “I saw the warnings, but I thought it was just... anxiety, or... stress… menopause… I’m not young, North, I – oh God, please don’t cry. I’m all right.”

North wipes her face furiously. “You almost  _died,_ ” she snarls. “You were bleeding out under my hands! I felt your heart  _stop!”_

“Humans aren’t meant to live forever.”

“I’m not asking you to live forever, I just don’t want you to die  _now!_  I didn’t  _want_  to care about a fucking human like this, I  _never_ wanted this.You could have  _died_ , you almost diedbecause you saved  _me_. That’s three times, three  _fucking_ times you’ve saved my life – why? Why would you  _do that to me?_ ”

Three times; three times North has saved Anne’s life in equal measure. Without North, she’d never have found Cudmore and fulfilled her promise to Cassie; without North it would have ended there; without North, Anne might have died four weeks or months or years from now from a clot or a heart attack in her car or her apartment because of a heart condition she didn’t pay attention to, horribly, painfully  _alone,_ all her demons finally winning, but North doesn’t want Anne to argue, she doesn’t want logic, she doesn’t want excuses. She needs – 

“Oh, North,” Anne whispers. “Sweetheart, come here.” 

She holds her arms out. She feels so weak, lying here in this fucking bed with a drip in her arm, tubes coming out of her and bandages all over her chest. But she still opens her arms and North – North chokes and falls into them. Androids aren’t light; they’re heavy, plastic and plating and metal, and the weight of her is uncomfortable as she sobs against Anne. But Anne holds her back, as tightly as she can, her own eyes burning with tears. Anne strokes her hair. Pushes the strands from her forehead. Leans forward – it hurts but she doesn’t care – and presses her lips to North’s forehead.

“You almost died,” North chokes. 

“I’d do it again if it meant saving you,” Anne whispers. Again and again and again because this brave, beautiful, remarkable woman, this android who is more human than almost anyone Anne has ever met, shattered by men and pieced back together by her own hand with gold, as bright and as furious as a supernova –  _North_  is the reason Anne Shapiro is still breathing.

“I don’t want you to die.”

“Oh, North. North. Shh.” She closes her eyes; the tears fall freely now, they have ever since the car, the church, the sunrise. “It’s all right, I’m right here, sweetheart.”

“Don’t leave me,” North begs. Her fist clenches in the fabric of Anne’s hospital gown, weeping against her chest. “I love you. Please don’t leave me.”

She’s been here before. She’s been here before and she never thought she’d have this again. “I’m here, baby girl. I’m right here. I love you, North, I have loved you so long –”

“Anne –  _mom_.”

“I’m right here,” Anne whispers, holding her daughter to her aching chest, to her beating, steady heart.

She’s not going anywhere.

**end**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> North: [yells at Anne]  
> Anne: [nopes out, puts self back into a coma]
> 
> Alternatively:
> 
> Anne: [can actually see with her own two eyes that her heart is wrong] huh must be stress  
> Sony Xperia FitBit App: Anne you're dying  
> Anne: [swipes notifications away] yolo
> 
> *WAILS* IT'S DONE?! IT'S DONE. To every single person who has take the time to read, give kudos and leave a comment, thank you so, so goddamned much. When I started this fic I honestly thought I'd get like, three readers and a shoelace because of my OC but y'all are just so fucking GOOD to me and I'm SOBBING. I couldn't have finished this fic without your support. THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH.
> 
> THANK YOU AGAIN, I HOPE YOU ENJOYED THIS AS MUCH AS I LOVED WRITING IT <3

**Author's Note:**

> David Cage: and THEN she FALLS IN LOVE with Markus two seconds after she tells him her TRAGIC RAPE BACKSTORY  
> Me: [quietly suffocates Cage with a pillow]
> 
> I want to protect North from everyone, but especially from David Cage. I'm so proud of this fandom for rescuing North from the game. She deserves so much better, so witness me give her the mother figure she _absolutely fucking deserves_ while I will fight David Cage to the death. And yes, Anne Shapiro is an original character. She's 50 years old and Done with everything. Enjoy!


End file.
